Rumor: PS5 announcement coming mid 2019 and more info at PSX 2019

[Mr Puggsly]

Pemalite said:

Mr Puggsly said:

I think my bigger concern is they would have to make a really expensive console to create something far more capable than the X1X. I mean the X1X already handles modern games with ease in the graphics department thanks to GPU and a big boost in RAM, I'm sure the improved CPU is also making 60 fps more stable. It seems like Ryzen would be perfect for new consoles and are much better for 60 fps. On GPU though, at a minimum I would like a double the GPU power as the X1X, which could be expensive but we need a big jump to justify new hardware.

Essentially, we need a significant specs upgrade but we already had a pretty significant hardware upgrade with the X1X. It could be argued the X1X already has the GPU power of a next gen console yet still not what's needed to make 4K standard. So pushing it to 2020 seems like a good idea just because we don't really need new consoles per se.

Well.

Improvements over the Xbox One X would mostly be centered around non-GPU specifications... I.E. Even the crappiest of Ryzen CPU's will beat Jaguar every day of the week, no contest... That will play into things like Character counts (Be it multiplayer or A.I driven), physics, destruction and general improvements to simulation quality.

Ram wise... GDDR6 is gaining steam, meaning more bandwidth, more fillrate, to help drive improvements in texturing and resolution, plus densities are about to jump up as well if they haven't done so already.

QLC stacked NAND is also cheap and ramping up as well... Which could provide the storage upgrade consoles have been longing for, provided they can beat spinning rust drives in terms of capacity/price.

On the GPU side though... AMD's GPU's, I.E. Polaris and Vega are pretty much trash from a performance/power consumption standpoint... There is allot of room to move on that front once AMD finally ditches the ageing, archaic, Graphics Core Next GPU architecture.

However, Vega on 7nm should provide an easy doubling in performance over the Xbox One X... Let alone what Navi or Next Gen will bring.

I think what truly needs to justify next-gen is a paradigm shift in rendering techniques... For example... From the 6th gen to the 7th gen we saw a massive shift from fixed-function rendering to programmable DX9-level pipelines.
And the 8th gen we saw a massive shift with DX11 feature sets (Tessellation), deferred rendering, global illumination etc'.

Next gen needs to be all about the Ray Tracing... And AMD isn't really ready to go down that rabbit hole just yet, they need real GPU hardware and a modern GPU architecture to go with that.

Mr Puggsly said:

For example, I believe GPU and RAM limitation were the biggest factors for 7th gen support ending. Meanwhile the Switch has pretty good ports 8th gen games because it has a lot more GPU power and RAM to work with.

You are correct.
Things were being stretched to their absolute limits.

I mean, the CPU's weren't exactly stellar either, but the GPU and Ram was certainly the biggest wall.

I'm no expert on PC specs, but a $100 Ryzen CPU seems like it can easily run most modern games above 60 fps. So yeah, I think that's what they will aim for at a minimum.

Not sure if RAM upgrade is that essential, really depends on the impact on price I suppose.

I think they're gonna stick with standard HDDs for years to come simply because its more space for the price. Given the size of games now, I would hope the 9th gen launches with 2TB HDDs.

I've seen ray tracing demos and I'm don't think its a great use of resources for the result. Just based on what I'm seeing thus far at least.

When I look at crossgen games of 2013-2015 the visuals were getting muddier (resolution and textures) but performance was par for the course. Textures in crossgen games started getting really muddy, I think that showed RAM was really being stretched. Skyrim struggled with RAM limitations years before the 8th gen. CPU though, that always seemed very capable in the 7th gen and even running some impressive games at 60 fps.