PS5’s Faster SSD Will Help Exclusives, but Multiplatform Games Will Likely Use Xbox Series X as Baseline

Two and a half years into the current console generation, we’re finally beginning to get to a point where developers are moving past cross-gen games, which, of course, means it hopefully won’t be too long before we see games that properly take advantage of the more powerful hardware that the new consoles afford them. Of course, one of the biggest selling points for both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X has been their SSDs- though with the former boasting a raw bandwidth of 5.5 GB/s and the latter standing at 2.4 GB/s, how will the two fare against each other?

According to Ricardo Cesteiro – co-owner and producer of Camel 101, the studio behind upcoming first person horror game Beneath – though the difference between the speeds of the two consoles might not count for much when it comes to multiplatform games, for games that will be exclusive to the PS5, it will be a much bigger boost, allowing for “quicker asynchronous level loading and assets” and, by extension, higher quality textures.

“With a raw bandwidth of 5.5 GB/s and SSDs, loading and unloading assets will be faster, resulting in quicker asynchronous level loading and assets,” Casetiro said in a recent interview with GamingBolt. “Background loading of parts of levels will go unnoticed by players, and keeping VRAM usage low will enable faster games. I don’t believe there will be a significant difference as most devs will likely use the baseline of 2.4 GB/s when developing for multiple platforms. However, the situation may be different for exclusive titles where the platform’s specs can be pushed to the limit. For instance, higher quality textures may be used because the streaming time will be a lot lower.”

Quicker load times and more efficient world streaming are, of course, some of several things that Sony has been touting for the PS5 since the console was revealed back in 2020, and with multiple exclusives now lined up that are being built exclusively for the console’s hardware, it should be interesting to see how that comes to fruition.

Camel 101’s Beneath is due out for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC sometime in 2024. Our full interview with Casetiro will be live soon, so stay runed for that.