Whilst the official specs are out in the wild, it’s still unclear just how big the power difference is between the Xbox Series X and PS5. Since the reveal of the PS5 specs, we’ve seen multiple Sony developers come out and say that the PS5 performs better than the specs suggest and the power difference will be quite minimal in practice.

Update: Chris reached out to us via twitter to provide this clarification:

Thanks for reaching out Charles. Sorry I wasn’t trying to discredit your article it’s the way some things come across. So with regards to that I was saying they would struggle with getting the right balance (as in may need to make compromises) not that the hardware can’t do it. — Chris Grannell (@CJGrannell) April 22, 2020

The proof will be in the pudding but since we haven’t seen either console in action, all we can do for now is rely on the experts. Speaking of, ex-Sony Killzone developer Chris Grannell recently featured on the RDX podcast where he shared his expert opinion on the matter:

The podcast is a long one clocking in just under the 3 hour mark. Topics such as Xbox Lockhart, PS5, Xbox Series X, Cyberpunk 2077 and more are all covered. In the section on talk of specs, Chris Grannell has this to say:

“The big [difference] really is the amount of CUs (compute units) that’s pretty…that’s pretty huge when you start to look at real time ray tracing and things like that…Where PS5 is potentially going to struggle is some of those big third party games like open world [games].”

When the talk moved onto ray tracing, the ex-Sony developer shared some interesting information:

“There’s only one next-gen console that will be able to do real time ray tracing. That’s a bit of a controversial statement…but Cerny skipped over it and didn’t talk about it…it comes down to CUs, consistency, what’s on the hardware.”

There’s a lot of focus on the compute units and here’s what we know in regards to that aspect so far:

Microsoft’s system has 16 more compute units than the PS5, representing an approximate 30% increase.