Playstation 5 vs Xbox Series X

[Smith1776]

I'm a fairly avid gamer. Video games seem to be the official pastime of those that are into programming and computer science. A programmer that doesn't like video games might be something akin to a car mechanic that doesn't drive a car. There's no law against it, but perhaps it's a little incongruous.

The next-gen console war is starting to heat up, with both Sony and Microsoft looking to release new consoles this year. I'm super pumped and am looking to get a PS5 on launch day (as I did with the PS4). It looks like the Xbox will have traditional compute capabilities (CPU/GPU/RAM) that will be marginally faster than the PS5. I'd peg it on the order of 10% in real world performance.

The PS5 however has an SSD that offers twice the bandwidth of the Xbox Series X. Apparently, it is fast enough to support real-time streaming of game assets into the game world, and facilitate near instant loading in general. This can lead to a revolution in game design, as previous console generations had a rather low glass ceiling in terms of game complexity, where the world generally had to fit in RAM. Tricks like loading the next level while cutscenes are playing may not be necessary on PS5, and we may see games that are "all in one take." (Think of a video game equivalent of the movie 1917.)

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How about you guys? Will any of you be picking up one of the next-gen consoles? Which one and why?

[Kriegsspiel]

I got a computer to play games on this year. I haven't played any video games in years, except hopping on my brother's xbox every once in a while. My idea is to ride behind the wave of technology, so I got a computer that could play all the best games from the past decade or so. I've been playing a lot of Civilization VI during the lockdown.