No one is actually saying that the Xbox Series X has a "mysterious bottleneck." Basically what is being said is that PS5, by selling in a much larger proportion, the versions are more optimized, especially at launch. And the other theory, which can be deduced from what many developers have said, is that working on PS5 is more comfortable.
They have mentioned several times that the PS4 was selling much more than the One X and that did not make the PS4 Pro and One X versions on par. And that argument does not hold up, for a multitude of compelling reasons:
- First of all, the technological difference was much greater (than between PS5 and XSX). Even if you don't optimize both the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro versions, by brute force it's very difficult for them to work on par.
- And yet, there were better versions on PS4 Pro! or games that were pretty evenly matched. We saw things as crazy as versions of One X games that exceeded the resolution of PS4 Pro by 70%, but we also saw that some games went at the same resolution and even worked better on PS4 Pro. It's hard to imagine how it could be possible for a significantly less powerful platform to have an equal or better version, but it happened.
I don't think there is any mystery here. The reasons DF says make sense. There are many examples of games clearly less optimized for Xbox, including bugs, crashes, games with transversal stuttering (some at launch, such as Control, which was later fixed through an update), games with Ray Tracing mode that come without Ray Tracing ...graphic problems... luckily they tend to be corrected, to a greater or lesser extent, but it makes it clear that the software side is very important. And if something can be fixed, it is that the culprit is not the hardware. It is the game optimization process or the API.
I repeat, One X had in its favor that the difference with PS4 Pro was enormous. Even if you didn't optimize correctly. It was also relatively common to see games with much higher resolution but worse performance:
If what happens in this screenshot is applied to today, there would be no shortage of comments like "PS5 is better designed and its much higher frequency makes its performance more stable." But the PS4 Pro wasn't faster than the One X. Some simply optimized worse on the Microsoft machine, or the resolution difference was too big. And I think something similar is currently happening (not the same, similar)
When we see screenshots like this and there is a current comparison, it is automatically denied that XSX is something more powerful and the narrative is that PS5 is better designed, or that because of its higher frequency it could work better ... even in Immortals Aveum, which XSX has a very consistent framerate advantage, it seemed that the winning version was the PS5 for having a focus filter! I don't think it's fair lol. It's actually probably either the game isn't optimized properly and has CPU/memory performance issues or it's at an earlier stage in the optimization process, or the game is rendering at 20 or 30% higher resolutions. The difference of 15-18% is not big enough. If PS5 has simpler tools, or is the priority platform, an extra 15% won't make XSX consistently better. Not really the 100% faster SSD of PS5 is running 100% faster than XSX in 99.9% of games... But that doesn't invalidate the fact that it's twice as fast.
On the other hand, as someone who has both consoles and sees each comparison to decide each version, the XSX resolutions are usually higher, as I demonstrated with the last 30 comparisons from the VG Tech media (which will also be green).
