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PlayStation 5 vs. Xbox Scarlett - Here's What We Now Know
The next-generation console race is heating up at E3 2019, so it's time to compare everything known so far about Sony's PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's recently unveiled Xbox Scarlett. From what's been divulged so far, it appears that they'll both be incredibly powerful machines, making console gamers' ever-tough decision about which platform to bring into their living room even tougher in 2020.
At Microsoft's conference yesterday, which was jam-packed with a laundry list of games, the Xbox team's Project Scarlett was officially unveiled for the world to see. Well, not quite - though the physical console itself wasn't actually shown off, viewers did get several juicy specs and details from the monster piece of hardware's developers and a few peeks under the hood at some of its groundbreaking internals in a stylish trailer. Meanwhile, Sony is notoriously skipping E3 this year, meaning that specific details about the elusive PS5 will be released by the company at its leisure.
That said, there is still quite a lot to go on as for how the PS5 will compete with Xbox Scarlett. According to specs aggregated by PlayStation Universe, the PS5 will sport an "eight-core, third-gen variant of AMD’s Ryzen CPU," a ray-tracing-capable "AMD Navi tech" GPU, a "super-fast, proprietary [presumably 1TB] SSD," and an estimated 16 GB of RAM. It's also widely rumored that Sony's upcoming console will prioritize backwards compatibility like no other console before it, and the PS5 has been all but confirmed to support cross-generational save transfers. For now, not much else is known, but that's likely to change incredibly soon - a solid guess would be just after all the hype and dust kicked up by E3 settles.
Meanwhile, Microsoft took to the E3 stage yesterday to confirm what many have suspected about Xbox Project Scarlett and more. Coming holiday 2020 with Halo Infinite promised as a launch title, Scarlett boasts a next-gen AMD CPU running on Zen 2 and Navi architecture (a chip that may ironically be the same custom CPU rumored to power the PS5), an SSD that will pull double duty as virtual RAM and increase performance by an alleged factor of 40, and high bandwidth GDDR6 RAM. Microsoft is promising that these impressive features will make Scarlett approximately four times more powerful than the Xbox One X, and the console will apparently eliminate load times and run games at 120 frames per second and resolutions as high 8K, all with real-time ray-tracing to boot. Additionally - contrary to popular assumptions after the discless Xbox One S was released this April - Project Scarlett will indeed have an optical disk drive for physical media.
Microsoft isn't kidding when they say that the next-generation of consoles will be the largest generational leap forward in gaming history, and that seems true for both Scarlett and the PS5.
