How about this scenario:
The PS5 was
supposed to be 8.4 TF with 36 CUs in 2019 (github). We were all supposed to be playing PS5 games now. TLOU 2 cross gen was probably going to be a launch window game. Same with Cyberpunk 2077 I imagine. This was supposed to be a repeat of PS2 2000 and Xbox 2001.
At AMD's, raytracing and/or Backcompat had unexpected setbacks and Sony delayed launch to 2020. In that year, they did what they could, spent more money on cooling (bloomberg) to boost the clock to 2.0 Ghz (github) , which gives them 9.2 TF. Closing the gap with Xbox by 1 TF. This explains the 12GB of memory (reddit) vs 16GB on the SeX deficit as well. 9 TF requires 25% less memory bandwidth than 12 TF. I expect this deficit to be gone today since RAM is easy to upgrade late, unlike APUs.
Everything in the old reddit leak checks out too well to be fake. Some of the predictions would've been ludicrous back then.
Another scenario would be that Sony managed to up their CU count by 50% to 54 CUs
in record time. It's
never been done but there is a first time for everything. If that were the case, they would be effectively tied with SeX. We're talking 3% slower.
Worst case scenario, At equal res, It's like 24 vs 30 FPS or 45 vs 60 FPS. The latter isn't too bad on HDMI 2.1 TVs, but the first is definitely bad. But that's worst case. Best case the resolution will be dynamic and the image will just look a tiny bit fuzzier on the PS5 without loss of framerate.
Someone unearthed this old post that turned out to be right about things (such as Xbox one S and X names, TF count, SSD, Sony plans, etc.) that were confirmed later. It has 0 claims that have been credibly contradicted by someone credible (such as Digital Foundry).
www.reddit.com
Bottom line, it looks like Sony's plans got wrecked when they couldn't release in 2019. Someone made a really bad technical prediction. They took a deliberate risk and it didn't payoff. Now they must mitigate as best they can until 2023 when they can release the PS5pro @ 18TF.
On its head, this is a story of triumph for Microsoft. Their hardware engineers knocked it out the park. I can't wait for the insider story on how the SeX sausage got made. (no pun intended!)
The vast majority of current games are still under 50GB, actually. There will be no next-gen increase in asset sizes since 4k assets have been a thing since PS4pro. In fact, we should see some small decrease thanks to SSD performance (no more data cloning hacks for slow HDDs) , deletable single player campaigns and some texture compression made possible by increased SSD and CPU speeds.
But worry not, for people like you and me, there will be premium consoles that comes with 2TB SSD at $599. Guaranteed! They do it every time.
