Imho, the best they could have is a cache modification.
I think this is not totally correct, XSX SoC taped out at least 6 month after PS5, and PS5 had earlier SoC (ie Navi10) to use as development platform (Sony mentioned slower dev kits). For XBX, there would have been early consoles for internal use from the A0 silicon. But Dante was not available for most devs until start of 2020 (this is well documents by many).
You can tape out earlier but have more steppings which was the case with the PS5 SOC. While Xbox began later with their first tape out they were faster on their final silicon candidates. Also PS5 had actually two different chips taped out. Ariel and Oberon. The Ariel was the chip in the first distributed hw dev kits. Oberon was an update on those kits with actual real final hardware.
How do you know the TO of Ariel? That is not a public known figure!
P.S. Never mind, donāt answer. Not worth it.
Awesome. Now, you know, show it. Give the fans something to talk about, point to and be excited about when it comes to āthe most powerful console.ā
That isnāt the way this breaks down. It isnāt a matter of Sony naming things differently or doing things slightly differently.
PS5 has no ML hardware capabilities (required for DLSS, confirmed by Sony). PS5 lacks 1 RDNA2 feature (confirmed by Sony, 99% certainty it is VRS which is a big deal). Their geometry engine is similar to mesh shaders, but not as efficient nor as flexible as mesh shaders.
What it comes down is that PS5 lacks VRS, which means it is missing 1 of the 3 core RDNA2 features (the 3 core features as per AMDās own presentations).
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Iām happy that people who were branded liars and even banned in certain places have been vindicated.
Iāll also say this Xbox team compared to 2013 is a sight to behold. Utterly ruthless. Starting this gen off correctly.
Any attempts at FUD by certain individuals are crushed within a day, theyāre confident and open on their processes and ideas.
And have delivered a compact and powerful console. Looking forward to seeing the machine get put through its paces.
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An interesting post from Digital Foundrys Alex, I pretty much share his opinion on this.
[Dictator said:]
My hunch here on this is that XSX and XSS have a more complete programmable Front end with mesh shaders (vs. the older primitive shader type), the Hardware VRS, and the technical hw required for the next Version of tiled resources, which is called Sampler Feedback. And I think, without saying positviely for certain, that that is why MS was so keen to make those features so prominent in their pre-release Material in the Xbox Series X. It was their hardware Feature advantage, they knew it, so they advertised it - just like how they advertised stable clocks as a thing even before Sony described the dynamic clocks to the public.
Will these advantages of a complete RDNA2 vs the PS5 GPU half way point matter? Probably. By a lot? Meh. Let us wait for the games. And for the games over time. I think the raw flop and bandwidth will matter the most at first though as the other Features, should they prove limited to just XSX and XSS, require dedicated peogramming time to take advantage of. And multiplatform games do not always spend the resources to do that even. Unlike a faster GPU, which is just faster.
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just digging the overall reaction about this news on some places I found something interesting. A lot of ppl trying to spin or relativize saying it is not a big deal or that Sony will have their own solution for this and that, etc. I get that ppl maybe trying to avoid console warring, however we need to call things by their names and that means the Xbox has the full features of rdna2 at hardware level implementation, it is not just some API level solution. How this will translate on real world we still need to see, but it will have a big impact on development once PC and Xbox will share the same features. It is confirmed that Sony doesnāt have mesh shaders and VRS still a no show. Those two are big Rdna 2 features. Not a very long time ago I saw a lot of ppl bragging on a 0.4 TF difference as it was night and day. This time Xbox came up the most advanced tech in a more powerful hardware, it is what it is.
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Ever since Microsoft were emphasising the hardware features I was fairly confident that it was because the PS5 doesnāt have them, especially when it was silence from Sony despite them not being shy about SSDs and Tempest.
In regards to his thought whether developers will take advantage of them, I think most will do, yes, and the reason is because these features will be standard on PC I think PC and Series X will become the default development platform due to GDK and games will mostly be ported to the PS5.
However, like he says, we will just have to wait and see.
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Gotta link to his comment?
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It is from Era 
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Link would be ideal. Donāt feel like digging for it myself. Wanna read the context of the post too. 
EDIT: Nevermind, found it!
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For everyone else:)
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Seems like xbox has advantage in raw power and feature set. How things have changed since that awful xbox one launch.
BTW, what are the qualifications of those guys at Digital Foundry? They seem very well respected. Do they have engineering background? Iām not trying to diss them, I know almost nothing about them.
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Holy shitā¦ great callback. Now I feel old, thanks.
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Honestly, still donāt really know what this means, but you all seem happy soā¦
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As expected, MS is not playing this gen.
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Thanks!
So now that AMD lifted the embargo on RDNA2 features, then it means that Sony can now speak about them on their official site, right? /s
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