Former Xbox Marketing Director Weighs in on the PS5

This week, Sony Interactive Entertainment revealed the PS5's full specs. In addition to this, it also revealed some new backwards compatibility details, as well as teased the power of the console's SSD and what it means for loading times. Unfortunately for Sony, fans weren't very impressed with all the information. That said, adding to this reaction was former Xbox marketing director Albert Penello, who left Microsoft back in 2018 after being with the company for 17 years. Penello noted that he thinks Sony is making some smart moves and that he's not disappointed because he never thought the console was going to be aiming for raw power in the first place. Further, if it manages to come in at $400, it will be a great deal.

"I think they are making a couple very smart moves, actually" said Penello. "Remember, I never thought it [the GPU] was going to be much over 9 teraflops so I'm not disappointed. If this thing is actually $399 I think it's a great deal."

Of course, the one problem here is that there's almost no way the PS5 will cost $400. If reports are correct about its manufacturing costs are, then it will almost certainly be priced at $500, which is fine. In fact, if you take inflation into consideration, it's largely in line with previous PlayStation consoles.

As for the PS5's GPU, it's not great, at least not compared to Xbox Series X. However, at the end of the day, how many teraflops a console has isn't that important. The reality is that while things like lots of RAM and GPU matter, we've largely hit the ceiling when it comes to visual fidelity in relation to budget and resources. Bigger specs doesn't change this. Meanwhile, many think the higher the GPU means the higher framerate, but this really isn't the case. There's other things determining this like cache coherency, bus bandwidth, memory read speed, and shader compute units. For some, the more teraflops the better, but anyone with an understanding of game development understands that while it's impressive that Xbox Series X has considerably more GPU power than the PS5, there's more at play.

H/T, Reset Era.