Last week we heard about the PS5's total GPU teraflop performance, which at 10.3 TFlops lags behind the Xbox Series X's 12 TFlops. Sony has stated that despite the difference in numbers, there are other ways to deliver top-class performance, but some new benchmarks suggest otherwise.

As Notebook Check noted, benchmarks for AMD's Radeon RX 5000 graphics card line give us an idea of how the two consoles perform in real life. The RX 5000 cards, also known by the codename "Navi," are a good comparison because they use the same RDNA 2 architecture as the new Xbox and new PlayStation chips.

It all comes down to clock speed, or how fast the processor can process a list of instructions. First, Sony itself has stated that the performance of the PS5 will vary depending on usage. This means that, as far as we know, the Xbox consistently delivers 1.8 GHz, whereas the PS5 can go below 2.23 GHz at the most.

Sony's main argument for ignoring the numerical gap between the PS5 and the Xbox Series X is that the PS5's GPU will run at a higher clock speed: 2.23 GHz is about 24% faster than 1.8 GHz, so the PS5 will perform 24% better than expected than expected.

Not according to what Notebook Check has seen; according to Notebook Check, overclocked RX 5000 cards do not make as big a leap in performance from speed as one might expect. As an example, an RX 5700 XT card overclocked by 18% will only improve frame rates by 5-7%. There is an improvement, but it is not linear, as Sony would have us believe.

The PS5 still has potential advantages such as faster 3D audio, SSD storage, and ray tracing, but the Xbox Series X also has the latter two features. It is too early to say for sure which console will win this generation's battle for supremacy, but the PS5's numbers do not look good so far.