Editor's Note: Crytek's Ali Salehi has reportedly retracted his comments about PS5. Twitter user @man4dead, who translated Salehi's interview, wrote today that "Ali Salehi no longer confirms the interview for personal reasons."

The user also deleted all tweets containing Salehi's quote; it is unclear whether Salehi was asked by Crytek to retract the statement or whether he broke some confidentiality agreement. The original article follows.

Sony's PS5 is better suited for game development than Microsoft's Xbox Series X, according to engineers at popular game developer Crytek.

In an interview with Persian gaming website Vigiato, Ali Saleh, a rendering engineer at Crytek, said he personally prefers working on the PS5 over the Xbox Series X.

"As a programmer, I would say that the PS5 is much better, and I don't think any programmer can name even one thing that the XSX does better than the PS5," Saleh said in an interview translated into English by a Persian Twitter user.

Over the past month or so, both Microsoft and Sony have given deep insights into the specs, design, and configuration of their next-generation game consoles. And in terms of raw power, the Xbox Series X leads the pack with 12 teraflops of graphics muscle, compared to up to 10.28 teraflops for the PS5.

But surface specs and computing power are one thing; getting all that hardware horsepower to play well in games is another.

Saleh believes that it is easier to unleash the teraflops of the PS5 than the teraflops of the Xbox Series X, noting that each piece of the console's core hardware must work together to get the best performance possible.

"Many elements must work together, each element feeding the others, and the results of one element feeding the others. If any one of these elements doesn't run fast enough, the performance of another part will suffer," said the Crytek engineer. [A good example of this situation has been seen before, with the PS3, which, because of its SPU, recorded much higher flops than the 360. But in practice, due to its complexity and memory bottlenecks and other problems, it never reached its peak performance on paper."

According to Saleh, one of the problems of programming for the Xbox Series X is that it has to use two different bandwidths of RAM, something that the PS5 does not have.

"A good example regarding the Xbox Series X hardware is RAM. Microsoft split the RAM into two parts, the same mistake they made with the Xbox One: one part of the RAM has higher bandwidth and the other has lower. And coding for this can be a bit difficult," Saleh explained.

Saleh added that the problem stems from the amount of "stuff" that developers want to put in the RAM with the most bandwidth, such as graphics assets and code. He added that this problem becomes more pronounced when 4K resolution is supported. This situation, he noted, will prevent developers from getting the most performance out of their GPUs.

This is also what Mark Cerny, lead architect of the PS5, said in Sony's "Road to PS5" presentation, claiming that the PS5 will be very easy to develop for.

Billy Kahn, lead engineer programmer at id Software, also claimed that the PS5 would be "great."

When the PS4 and Xbox One were announced in 2013, both machines had very similar specifications and shared virtually the same AMD-based base architecture. Although there was a slight performance difference, the PS4 initially had the upper hand due to a combination of low price and a large amount of attractive exclusive software.

But as that generation matured, the Xbox began to catch up to the PS4, and both Sony and Microsoft released souped-up 4K versions of their consoles in the form of the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.

Both consoles now matched up reasonably well, and it looked like the old console wars might finally be over.

However, while the PS5 and Xbox Series X both use AMD technology at their hearts, they have different approaches to power output and configuration. While the Xbox Series X is more powerful when it comes to raw GPU power, the PS5 appears to have faster storage, with an SSD throughput of 5.5 GB/sec, more than double that of the Xbox Series X. This could make a big difference in game load times.

Also, while some developers seem to favor the PS5, there are a number of development studios under the Microsoft umbrella that can take full advantage of the Xbox Series X.