PS5 vs Xbox Series X: What We Actually Know So Far
With E3 cancelled, Sony and Microsoft are set to reveal PS5 and Xbox Series X separately — here's what's confirmed and what's still a guess.
E3 2020 is officially off the table thanks to COVID-19, which means the usual circus of stage presentations and crowd reactions isn’t happening this year. Instead, Sony and Microsoft are both expected to hold their own digital reveal events for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X sometime in the coming weeks. No packed conference hall, no live crowd noise — just a stream and whatever they decide to show us. Honestly, I think this could work in their favor. No time constraints, no sharing the stage with other publishers, just a focused pitch for their own hardware.
So what do we actually know, as opposed to what’s been rumored into existence by forum theorizing? Not a ton, but the core stuff is locked in. Both consoles are confirmed for a holiday 2020 launch — so we’re looking at a window that almost certainly means November, based on how console launches have historically been timed. Both companies have also confirmed custom SSDs, which is arguably the more interesting story here compared to raw teraflop numbers. Load times have been the single biggest friction point in gaming for a decade, and if these SSDs deliver on the promise of near-instant loading and more seamless open worlds, that’s a bigger experiential leap than a resolution bump.
On the graphics side, both machines are built around AMD’s RDNA2 architecture for their GPUs. This is notable because it’s the first time in a while that both platform holders are running such closely aligned underlying tech — previous generations had more divergence in GPU architecture and philosophy. RDNA2 is AMD’s next-gen graphics lineup, and having both consoles built on the same GPU family should, in theory, make cross-platform development a bit more symmetrical. Developers won’t have to account for wildly different rendering pipelines the way they sometimes did between PS4 and Xbox One.
What’s still unknown
Pricing. Exact specs like clock speeds, RAM configuration, and final SSD throughput numbers. Launch lineup. Whether backward compatibility will extend meaningfully beyond the current generation. And obviously, the actual look of the hardware itself — we’ve seen dev kit photos and speculative renders, but nothing official from either camp yet.
Given how similar the underlying tech is shaping up to be, I suspect this generation’s console war gets decided less on hardware specs and more on exclusives, service ecosystem (Game Pass being a wildcard here), and price point. If Sony and Microsoft land within striking distance of each other on raw power, the differentiators are going to be everything wrapped around the silicon rather than the silicon itself.
I’ll be watching for whichever reveal event drops first. Until then, treat any leaked spec sheet with a healthy dose of skepticism — we’re still in the season where “sources familiar with the matter” outnumbers actual confirmed details by a wide margin.