Hello everyone Trisha Hershberger here. Here at Newegg we’re obviously big PC
gamers - but we’re also known to spend some time in the console world hanging
out with Gods of War and Masters Chief. So when both Microsoft and Sony recently
shared the hardware details of their upcoming consoles, Xbox Series X and
PlayStation 5, we were paying close attention to what was announced and what
both consoles are offering gamers. Here are five things you should know about the
upcoming consoles launching later this year: Number One - While both Sony and
Microsoft will offer 4k gaming with 8k support, an 8x Zen2 Core CPU, 16GB
of RAM, an SSD Hard drive, and custom AMD GPUs, the difference comes in
teraflops. Xbox Series X will be delivering 12 teraflops while
PlayStation will be offering 10.28. For comparison’s sake, Xbox One offered 1.31
teraflops and PS4 offered 1.84. So what’s a teraflop, and why is it important?
“Flops” stands for “floating-point operations per second,” and
is a way of measuring the raw brainpower a processing unit has to do the
complicated math needed to fill our screens with beautiful polygons. A
teraflop is a trillion flops, and the PS5 and Xbox
Series X can pump out over five times as many as the previous generation, so we
can expect impressive graphics from both systems. Number Two - The new generation of
consoles are moving to SSDs, finally! How does a solid state drive improve your
gameplay experience? With a traditional hard drive, your information is stored on
a series of stacked spinning platters. When you want to access or save a piece
of information, like when you’re loading a game, the platters spin up and a tiny
mechanical arm physically reads the data off the discs. This, as you can imagine, is
pretty time-consuming. SSDs are solid-state memory, which has no moving
parts, so read and write times are much faster. Games will be more responsive,
load faster, and feel snappier. Sure, this might make it harder to check your
phone or brush up on the lore of the next Elder Scrolls game every time you
hit a loading screen, but I think the tradeoff is worth it. Number three -
Ray Tracing! Real-time ray-tracing will be offered on both Xbox Series X and
PlayStation 5. And while us PC gamers have been enjoying ray tracing technology for
almost a year now, what does that mean on consoles? When the sunlight through the
trees is just right, or your flashlight illuminates a zombie’s brain
realistically, a game’s environment feels more authentically lifelike. Ray tracing,
which Hollywood has been using for years now, enables a massive improvement of
in-game lighting by calculating light rays that accurately interact with
objects and surfaces in the environment. The new console GPUs will be crunching
some crazy math behind the scenes so light scatters on the surface of a
pond, your dying flashlight falls away into
half-darkness, and your sweet new armor is appropriately shiny. Number four -
Backwards compatibility! Microsoft announced that Xbox Series X will be
backward compatible with every game currently playable on Xbox One. That
means every game developed for Xbox One and every Xbox 360 and Original Xbox
game currently playable on Xbox One. That’s support for FOUR generations of
games on Xbox Series X. Meanwhile, Sony has only announced PlayStation 5
backward compatibility with PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR games - and they’ve
only officially confirmed that it will support "almost all" of the top 100 PS4
games at launch. So that “forever compatibility” rumor going around for all
PlayStation consoles has yet to be confirmed. Sorry, guys. Number five - Games!
Actually we don’t have much information here, except that Halo Infinite and MAYBE
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 will be “launch titles” for Xbox Series X, even
even though they’ll still both be playable on Xbox One and Windows 10. Sony has yet to
announce any PlayStation 5 exclusives however huge games like The Last of Us
Part 2 and Ghost of Tsushima are sure to take advantage of the PS5’s massive
hardware. And we can expect the months go by and we near what was supposed to be
E3 2020, we’ll get more announcements. Finally if you're wondering about VR in
this new generation of consoles, Microsoft has said they have no plans
for VR at the moment, but not to rule anything out. Sony, on the other hand, has
only said PlayStation 5 will support PSVR, and has made
no mention of a new VR headset in development. So what do you think? Are you
feeling what Xbox Series X is offering, or are you leaning more towards
PlayStation 5? Or maybe it’s all about the games and you’re waiting it out?
Let us know in the comments!
My name is Trisha Hershberger and I'll see you next time right here at Newegg.