Prediction: PS6 won't sell over 50 million units lifetime.

[EricHiggin]

Kyuu said:

Hardstuck-Platinum said:

You think a 10W handheld can outperform a 220W PS5? It might get close in terms of image quality but that's only because it will have PSSR and PS5 doesn't. We already know it won't outperform it because we know the power save mode is just a secret compatibility layer for the handheld system, and PS5 is significantly less performant in power save mode. 

I know power alone doesn't decide support. Didn't mean for it to sound like that. I think that whole last paragraph paragraph doesn't really apply because I'm pretty certain that next gen the PS5 will still be main target platform throughout the entire gen. Sony had an incentive to stop PS4 support because it had bottlenecks like Slow HDD and terrible CPU. PS5 has no bottlenecks. The new Playstations will just be additions to the PS5. They'll take the PS5 version and scale it down for the PS6P and scale it up for the PS6 professional or whatever it'll be called.

Power saver mode doesn't tell us anything about the handheld's true capabilities. Power Saver serves as a quick and easy patch to make older games playable in an acceptable form on the handheld with minimal effort from developers. It's for the developers that don't wanna go through the headache of patching their old games in a way that takes full advantage of the handheld's feature set. Without the feature set being used to the max, PS6P is a lot weaker than a PS5. But future games will use the feature set which it shares with the standard PS6. To many developers, reworking on old games just isn't worth the effort.

If you wanna get a sense on how the handheld will fare against PS5, look no further than Switch 2. The Switch 2 is holding its own against PS5's image quality in some instances due to DLSS vs crappy spacial upscalers, and is crushing the Series S. Where it struggles is the CPU which is weaker than SteamDeck's. PS6P's CPU is reportedly a lot more capable than SteamDeck's. And GPU-wise, roughly: RDNA5 (PS6) > Blackwell > Lovelace > RDNA4 > Ampere (Switch 2) > RDNA3 = Touring > RDNA2 (PS5/SteamDeck). Feature-wise, PS6 is a genuine generational jump. PS5 missed the Machine Learning revolution.

When the full feature set is used, the PS6P will punch far above its weight just like the Switch 2. At worst, PS6P vs PS5 will play out like Switch 2 vs Series S, provided no downgrades are made.

You're probably right on PS5 being supported throughout the entire PS6 generation, but at some point in the future many developers will abandon it. Old technology doesn't last forever. It's early to say what Sony intend to do with their next handheld though, so we're just speculating. I wouldn't put it past them to mandate it as part of the PS6 family only to then remove the mandate sometime during the next generation.

Depends on what Zen5/6 and RDNA 5 is truly capable of. Also depends on what node the chips are using and what the node is capable of. 

Games built specifically for the handheld (10th gen) should match if not exceed PS5 most of the time. Maybe not in all ways but overall it should.

PS5 will only be supported throughout all of 10th gen if the handheld is too costly and it's not subsidized (enough). If SNY makes a PS6 Lite console, and especially if they subsidize it, they'll discontinue PS5 relatively quickly.