Soundwave said:
The report that I had read from a good tech message board is around a 4080, but it's not like there's a huge difference between a 4080 and a 5070 anyway. By late 2027 that won't be the latest and greatest as the 60 series will be out and 70 series will be about to release. It doesn't really matter anyway, the pertinent take away is actually the PS6 Portable thing, that device being sub-PS5 will basically hold developers to make all games to that spec anyway (just like XBox Series S). That device likely is going to sell better than the Series S, so it will get support, developers are not going to want to miss out on potential extra sales, so that already cuts the knees off next-gen anyway. Console generations as we knew them are basically over I think. On top of the technical issues, developers can't even manage PS5 workflows, there's no budget or time to do something like "hey lets double the budget and double the development time". $500 million games that take 10-12 years to produce is the death knell of the industry. Sony knows this full well too, that's why they are OK with releasing a PS6 Portable knowing it will knee cap software development. They know they can't just keep chasing the "2x! 3x! 5x better graphics!" ... developers are worn out and at their breaking point as is, even their own internal developers. We're headed towards a future where forget about the budget being north of $300-$400 milion for a game, we're going to a place where a game that starts development even before a hardware generation starts may not even release during that hardware generation ... lmao. Like games could easily take 8-10 years to finish the way we are going. PS5 is going to be the baseline for development for a long, long time. The days of console generational shifts like Super NES to N64, PS1 to PS2, even N64 to Dreamcast I think are over. It's not sustainable and I think even as is, without the PS6 being cutting edge, it's still going to be fairly expensive ($600-$700+). Days of cheap hardware that went down in price and massive performance jumps every 3-5 years like clockwork ... yeah that time has passed. If you missed the 90s and 2000s I guess tough for you, you'll never know what that was like. |
Consoles are never going to match contemporary highend PC's. So obviously it won't be cutting edge by PC standards, but hopefully it's good for the price.
PS6 handheld isn't going to hold back anything until maybe after the PS7 is out. PS5 was launched as a powerful and cheap console in 2020 without a weaker version to potentially hold it back, and yet we all know how that ended up. Developers aren't going to design around PS6 specs or even PS6 handheld specs. They will typically design their games to work on weaker systems than the PS6 handheld and scale/soup up. PS6 handheld is taking advantage of market realities beyond Sony's or anyone's control.
What held back the PS5 in most cases wasn't the Seires S. It was the PS4/Xbox One, or more accurately: "market realities like diminishing returns, rising prices, and development times/costs".
The few developers who found it challenging to develop for the Series S chose to delay their games on Xbox for optimization, or skipped it altogether. The most troubling aspect about the Series S was the limited RAM which even the Switch 2 exceeded.
As you said, generations as we once knew them are dead, and this isn't something that an ultra powerful PS6 can change. Marvel Rivals just got announced for the PS4 lmao. PS6 will be held back no matter what. The base spec for most developers will gradually go down, and one day modern AAA games will be scalable to mid-range mobile phones. On the plus side, RayTracing, AI, and technologies like Nanite will be able to make "scalable" games look quite amazing on highend hardware at relatively cheap costs.
