PS6 will be 20% faster than next gen Xbox suggests leaked specs

New rumours for the PS6 give a good indication of its release date, price, and how powerful it will be compared to its Xbox counterpart.

We’re now at that stage in the generation where new consoles from Sony and Microsoft are becoming imminent but nothing official has been announced, other than that they exist.

It’s still not certain what year they’ll be released – either 2027 or 2028 – but a new rumour claims it’s the former for the PlayStation 6, which means the next gen Xbox won’t be far behind. That in turn means we’ll almost certainly get an official reveal next year, with a small chance of this year (the Xbox Series X was unveiled at The Game Awards in December).

The release dates won’t be set in stone yet, but the latest rumour also deals with the supposed power of the machines and, if true, it seems the new PlayStation will once again beat its Xbox rival, by a relatively significant margin.

For many fans, the new generation seems to be arriving too early, especially as there was such little improvement in graphics from the PlayStation 4 to 5. That implies there’ll be even less between the PlayStation 5 and 6, but rather than looking for some new selling point this latest leak implies that Sony is going all out to make their next console as powerful as possible.

Anonymous insider KeplerL2 has been leaking information on both consoles for some time now, although this appears to be because of information he gets from AMD sources, rather than directly from Sony or Microsoft.

Writing on the forum NeoGAF, KeplerL2 states that the PlayStation 6’s chip design has already been finalised and should reach the A0 tapeout step (the first time the finished chip is manufactured) this autumn, which means the console itself should be ready for sale roughly two years later.

Because AMD is providing chips to both next gen consoles it means that anyone that has insider information from them is able to make quite specific comparisons.

KeplerL2 claims that the PlayStation is equivalent to a Radeon RX 9070 XT graphic card, while the next gen Xbox is closer to a less powerful RTX 5080. That would make the PlayStation 6 roughly 20% more powerful than its would-be Xbox rival, which is roughly the same as the difference between the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

Supposedly the next gen consoles will have every feature of AMD’s latest Blackwell microarchitecture ‘and then some’. This is likely to include path-tracing, a new and even more realistic evolution of ray-tracing.

There are more technical details in KeplerL2’s original posts, as well as links to related patents, but the problem with tech specs, whether official or unofficial, is they only give a very limited idea of what a console is capable of, with the actual graphics being far more dependent on the skill, or lack thereof, of the developer. Not to mention practical and monetary limitations.

The PlayStation 5 might be 20% more powerful than the Xbox Series X on paper but that is barely evident in reality, with most multiformat games looking all but identical.

If next gen Xbox hardware sales perform even worse than the Xbox Series X/S then publishers may be convinced to focus more solely on the PlayStation 6 but that will be something that Microsoft will be trying its level best to convince them not to do.

Pricing is impossible to predict at this point, given Trump’s ever-changing tariffs, but supposedly the idea is that the PlayStation 6 should be less than the £699 PS5 Pro and ideally the same as the £449/$499 launch price of the PlayStation 5.

There’s no mention of the frequently rumoured new PlayStation handheld, in this new batch of rumours, but also no attempt to suggest it doesn’t exist.

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