Considering it's highly likely that PS4 and Pro will get a super slim and slim model, by holiday 2019 a $199 and $299 price point seems totally possible, aside from a potential PS5 announcement. What MS could do, while I wouldn't suggest it myself, is instead of wait like I would, they could announce and reveal at e3 2019, and launch shortly afterwards. That may give them a couple months on the market before a PS4 price drop happens, and maybe even longer before a PS5 announcement. That however would make it even tougher to launch with a worthwhile spec jump, even at $500, and would certainly be risky in terms of holding onto the power crown with PS5 showing up 6 to 18 months later.

Depends on how CPU intensive the games are I suppose.

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.

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.

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.

In all fairness though, even Nvidia is only really just dabbling with that tech with their RTX cards right nowO But I guess we can at least give them credit for trying.

I agree though that Ray tracing is the next true shift in rendering but I really don't see amd or nvidia having anything viable for another 3 to four years. Especially when considering how its implemented right now on the RTX cards. Using ray tracing pretty much bottlenecks the card. 

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.

I strongly doubt they will. And for a number of reasons.

If consoles opt to go with HDDs again, then in about 3 years time they could find themselves as the only ones still using that antiquated technology. I mean right now even $300 laptops come with 128GB m.2 SSDs. And then there is performance. HDDs are slow. But lets put this into context; Right now we have ~5GB of RAM available for games in the current consoles. I think its safe to say that next gen that allotment will at the very least double. Using a HDD we already have games that take around 30 - 70 secs to load in a level or stage. If the RAM size doubles and game asset sizes double too then it will literally take twice as long to load up that level. We are going into a gen of higher rez textures on everything including shadows and the usual bump in general assets and code. Thats not going to be very pleasant at all.

I really don't think they will have any problem at all launching these consoles with 500GB on an M.2 drive. Those things cost around $70 right now on amazon which means that in about 18 months they could be down to as little as $50. That means it will cost Sony and MS (OEM pricing) as little as $30 for a 500GB M.2 SSD. They just launch with that and allow ext HDD support from day one so gamers can backup games they aren't actively playing. And even allow gamers upgrade their internal SSD if they want to.

Its simply the best way to go forward. They could even get 1TB drives for as little as $50 at the time. 

Thing is, the only real cost of going with an SSD is capacity. But it comes with a lot of benefits and ensures future proofing. But the second they put a HDD in there, they build in limitations that they will never be able to overcome for the rest of that generation. Because games are always built to the lowest spec....

While having 2TB in the box would be great.... that really means nothing to an end user. If asked to be able to store 32 games as opposed to 8 games in their consoles but then choose between an all round snappier UI and loading games in 15 seconds as opposed to 50 seconds..... its my guess that speed will win everytime. 

Well a SDD can certainly speed up load times, I don't think the X1 interface is sluggish due to the HDD. For example, my Windows 10 UI is a lot faster with the same HDD tech.

Maybe they use a combination of both though. Like 128GB (or smaller) SSD for OS functions snappy and a 2TB (maybe 4TB) HDD for games. Based on prices I'm seeing, that would still be cheaper than a single 2TB SSD and using two storage devices seems to speed up load times on 8th gen consoles.

I think 2020 is gonna be too soon to make the Switch to SSD. But its certainly looking like a feasible option at some point of the 9th gen.

It is a miracle consoles are still in the 399-499 price range at launch given how much purchasing power inflation has eaten from a lot of currencies, including the dollar in the last 20 years.

Well. RTX is built at 12nm, which is essentially just a retooled 14/16nm process anyway.

I think architecturally it will start to come into it's own at 7nm where nVidia should be able to dedicate more silicon to the problem.

Though... To be fair, I don't really like nVidia's approach to Ray tracing anyway, but that's a discussion for another day.

Certainly can. The Ryzen 3 2300X is a Quadcore that operates at 3.5Ghz-4ghz. It's actually a pretty capable gaming CPU.
Even the slower 1300X is a pretty decent chip as well.

8GB of Ram is really starting to become a limiting issue on the PC. So the consoles need to step it up.

I only mentioned SSD's because QLC NAND is getting cheap, but also slow, requiring the need for SLC/MLC NAND and DRAM to cache.
...Next gen is still a year or two away, meaning there is still time for the market to play the pricing game and make it a possible opportunity.

Otherwise... I completely agree, spinning rust will be here to stay if there isn't sufficient downward price movements on QLC Nand.

It's still early days yet.

Developers were also leveraging the CPU to do framebuffer effects like morphological AA, which didn't really help with things, it's literally a filter that goes around the games scene and blurs all the edges.
Plus... Around half way through the generation developers were starting to stream meshes and textures from disk into Ram just so they could get some extra mileage out of it... And also started to employ techniques like impostering to cut down on geometric complexity in scenes.

Performance is secondary to cost in the console space, that's the reality of the situation.
However... To be fair, the mechanical drives in the Xbox One and Playstation 4 weren't exactly the fastest on the market anyway.

The base Xbox one and Playstation 4 had drives that were good for probably 60-70MB/s of sustained reads, modern drives are capable of doubling that performance fairly easily and for semi-decent drives, even a tripling in performance.

The take away is that there is allot of room to move in improving performance even if Microsoft/Sony stick with spinning rust.

That would just complicate things. 

And when I said snappy I wasn't particularly talking about OS functions but more about loading times in games. The faster drives wouldn't even be making those better per say but at least keeping them on par with what we have this gen as opposed to them getting worse.

And again if they are going with SSDs then they wouldn't put 2TB in the consoles. At best 1TB. And in 2020 that can cost them as little as $40. Remember, prices for them are very different from prices for us at amazon and co.....

More importantly though the storage problem can easily be fixed. They can just put in 1TB SSD and give buyers the option of upgrading or expanding their storage.

Honestly, I wouldn't even be surprised if the nand modules are soldered directly onto the board to further save costs.