Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 CPU Comparison – Stable 60 FPS Finally Possible on Consoles

So we finally know most of the specs for both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 and have learned that both will be very capable systems. However, they are not identical hence why we will look into the differences between both consoles specs. Today we will be looking at the CPU components of both systems aside from the very fast SSDs that will make a huge difference next-generation. CPU processing power has increased dramatically for both machines.

Both consoles will ship with AMD Zen 2 based CPU with 8 cores and 16 threads in comparison to PS4 and Xbox One’s 8 core and 8 threads CPUs.

PlayStation 5 CPU is clocked at 3.5 GHz with all threads activated all the time. Clock frequency may drop by few percent under heavy workload or due power constrain. Xbox Series X operates in two modes. The first mode offers 3.8GHz CPU frequency with only 8 threads enabled while the second mode offers 16 threads, 2 threads per core, at 3.6GHz. It will be up to the developer to choose the mode for their particular game. This approach will benefit game engines that don’t use SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading) and there are still a lot of games like this. We still don’t know the CPU cache size for both consoles as of the writing of this article, but I would assume both will use similar if not the same amount of cache.

My take:

With all that said I’m pretty impressed with the CPUs in both consoles as they could potentially offer performance close to the Ryzen 3700X. The reason I say close to the performance of the Ryzen 3700X is due to its offered boost clock over 4GHz and a lot of caches which usually impacts performance. These main processors will offer more than enough processing power to run most games at 60 FPS minimum with improved physics and AI in conjunction with that. Let’s not forget that both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 will comes with dedicated hardware accelerators for audio and data compression/decompression. Generally, this would have to be run on the CPU otherwise. That means that the CPU will now have freed up resources available for other important tasks.

The Xbox engineering team has claimed that the Xbox Series X CPU offers four times the performance of Xbox One and I believe that the same can be said about the PS5’s CPU. This would mean that most (if not all) games should run at 60 FPS and some maybe even up to 120 FPS. I can see games like Overwatch or Diablo even being able to run at 120 FPS. Huge open-world games should run at 60 FPS and not be locked to 30 FPS like current generation consoles. The only scenario where a game would be locked to 30 FPS next-gen is when a developer chooses to do so as they may want to push their game for incredible visuals and high resolution at the same time.

In any event, we are due for much smoother experiences next generation and that should make everyone happy.

SOURCE: PlayStation, Xbox