Competition is a good thing in certain industries. It can bring out the best in people, dare people to make bold decisions that can change the face of the industry, and do things that no one expected. The gaming industry is an excellent example of that because without the “console wars,” key companies wouldn’t have gotten into the gaming space, and certain franchises, innovations, and more wouldn’t have been made. Plus, it gives fire to publishers and developers to try and outdo their competitors, such as when Microsoft made the Xbox Series X/S to beat the Sony PS5 in the specs department.
You might recall a certain leaked email from Xbox head Phil Spencer that claimed that they had a “better piece of hardware” than Sony and that the Xbox Series X/S was totally going to crush the PlayStation 5 when the two came out. As you all know, that’s not what happened at all. Sony’s system is dominating the sales market in the head-to-head competition, and many have noted that the PlayStation 5 actually outperforms the Xbox Series X/S in specific ways with certain games. But how is that possible when one is supposed to be the “best piece of hardware ever built for gaming?” Well, as Eurogamer noted in a special analysis piece… it’s all about how you put your system together.
Simply put, when Microsoft made its system, it tried to make it so that it was closer to the style of a PC build; that way, it could do easier cross-platform creation with its games. However, the PS5 has things like a better GPU compiler, not to mention it has the ability to do better clock speeds. When you mix that with the system’s other elements, you can see why it performs better than its Microsoft competitor with certain games.
That’s not to say that the Xbox Series X/S doesn’t do anything right; the team behind the analysis notes that the are certain recent games, like Elden Ring, that run better on the Microsoft platform due to how it handles things like refresh rates, but they also stated that the gap is so close that you can honestly play a game on both and not see much of a difference.
The irony here is that when it comes to that competition, the PlayStation is the true winner, as they have a much larger gaming library, and Xbox is still playing catchup on that front.
