Devil May Cry 5: Special Edition - the first PS5 vs Xbox Series X platform comparison

It's finally happening. Ever since Microsoft and Sony revealed the hardware specifications of Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, the question has always been to what extent differences in teraflops, clock speeds and memory bandwidth will actually translate into the gameplay experience and today, we have our first glimpse at how the systems truly compare. Capcom's Devil May Cry 5: Special Edition was initially supplied to us on PlayStation 5 last week, with Xbox Series X code arriving yesterday. There's what looks very much like feature parity across the board here, and a unique set-up that's very friendly for benchmarking - so which machine is faster?

First of all, it's worth emphasising just how preliminary this test is. Devil May Cry 5: Special Edition is essentially a cross-gen title - an enhanced version of the game already available on current generation Xbox and PlayStation hardware. And we also know from developer conversations just how hard it's been to get final software ready for launch, especially on the Xbox side, where several studios have had challenges in moving across to the development environment. With that said, however, Capcom previously stated that Xbox Series X would not ship with ray tracing support, which would be PlayStation 5 only - but the truth is that both consoles arrive with the exact same features across the board, RT included.

However, DMC5 is in many ways an excellent test for performance. First of all, the game features several rendering modes - all of which appear to be identical between the two systems. The fact that they are so similar means that Capcom felt confident enough in the specs of both systems that they did not feel that they had to reduce resolution on one or the other. Secondly, we have several rendering modes available - a standard 'normal' native 4K option, ray traced quality and performance modes, plus a high frame-rate mode aimed at 120Hz gaming. On top of that, when run on a 120Hz screen, all modes operate with an unlocked frame-rate, meaning that every game variation has the potential to break the 60fps barrier. In short, this is as close to a benchmark as you're going to get.

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