Friday, February 16th 2024

Next-gen Games Consoles Predicted to Cost More or Offer Smaller Performance Uplift

Hiroki Totoki—Chief Operating Officer (COO) and president of Sony Group Corporation—expressed slight disappointment in PlayStation 5's Q3Y23 sales performance. The console's lifetime total (since November 2020) hit an impressive 50 million units sold milestone last December, but Sony's top brass had set an aggressive target of 25 million PS5 units sold through the fiscal year of 2023. A recent company earnings call highlighted a revised sales goal of 21 million units, and the PlayStation top executive's uneasy outlook for the fourth quarter and beyond. Genki Japan parsed this information into an easy to digest Tweet: "Sony COO Totoki said that it is harder to grow profits on the PS5 as the life cycle goes on in comparison to previous generations. With previous gens as time went on it became cheaper to produce them. But with PS5 the parts are becoming more expensive as the life cycle goes on."

Well known hardware tipster—Kepler_L2—followed up on Genki's brief report with an insight into semiconductor conditions (current day and in times ahead): "Cost per transistor has remained flat through FinFETs and will go up with GAAFETs/CFETs. The days of free cost savings with die shrinks is over and things will only get worse. Future consoles will either have increasingly smaller performance gains or significantly higher prices." Kepler_L2 has a pretty good track record of covering unreleased AMD CPU and GPU technologies, particularly in the field of Sony and Microsoft gaming hardware—they were last seen weighing in on the matter of speculated PlayStation 5 Pro specifications. Industry observers believe that the proper next-generation PlayStation and Xbox consoles will launch with insides occupied by Team Red-designed tech, despite early 2024 rumblings of NVIDIA and Intel pitching in with shopped proposals.
Sources: Kepler_L2 Tweet, Wccftech, Eurogamer, Sony Meeting Notes
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32 Comments on Next-gen Games Consoles Predicted to Cost More or Offer Smaller Performance Uplift

#26
Vya Domus
trsttteIt's not like we're in desperate need of a performance uplift anyway, the current gen can already game at 4k60 and probably half the user base is still using them with older 1080p TVs.
Very rarely do games run at 60fps and almost never at actual 4K.
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#27
trsttte
Vya DomusVery rarely do games run at 60fps and almost never at actual 4K.
That's the old debate of upscalling and fixed framerate and so on but the console is technically speaking outputting 4k60 for a significant number of games (performance mode instead of visual as well but again, whatever). We don't need a big performance leap to reduce the ammount of upscalling and to eliminate perfomance/visual priority settings.
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#28
Vya Domus
trstttebut the console is technically speaking outputting 4k60
That does not mean anything.

The matter of fact is the vast majority of games still don't run anywhere close to 4k60.
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#29
Onasi
trsttteThat's the old debate of upscalling and fixed framerate and so on but the console is technically speaking outputting 4k60 for a significant number of games (performance mode instead of visual as well but again, whatever). We don't need a big performance leap to reduce the ammount of upscalling and to eliminate perfomance/visual priority settings.
We’ve been here before. You give the developers more power and they will, inevitably, spend it on more graphical shinies which, in turn, will hurt performance and will lead to upscaling/checkerboarding/30 FPS as a compromise. Absolutely nothing stops the current consoles from having games that run at 4K60 natively without any tricks. They just need to look “worse”. But it has been observed by MS and Sony that pretty graphics sell systems, console players are okay with 30 frames and any upscaling techniques are not much of a bother to people playing on TVs 2 meters or more away. So… we are stuck in a vicious cycle. I remember how theoretically much more powerful the XBone and PS4 were compared to predecessors and yet Battlefield 4, a cross-gen launch title, still had to run at 900p.
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#30
ZoneDymo
Vya DomusVery rarely do games run at 60fps and almost never at actual 4K.
yeah bit imo that is also a rather insane target, who of us runs games at actual 4k that does not also have a 1000+ dollar (or way more then that) GPU?
That is just impossible to do on modern games.
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#31
Bwaze
The reason:

"A 12-inch wafer is a lot more expensive today than it was yesterday, and it's not a little bit more expensive, it is a ton more expensive," "Moore's Law is dead … It's completely over, and so the idea that a chip is going to go down in cost over time, unfortunately, is a story of the past."

Jensen Huang, Sep. 2022.

Also, they can blame it on AI hogging the manufacturing.
Posted on Reply
#32
Chrispy_
With less console-exclsusive titles, and more cross-platform launches, the hardware race between consoles is back on again.

For a while it didn't matter if XBox was more powerful the Playstation or vice-versa because most of the good titles were only available on that platform. Now we have more of the better games being from independent studios and releasing on both consoles simultaneously, direct comparisons will be made between XBox and Playstation versions, with the superior quality/framerate option being the one that plebs buy because that's what The Verge said you have to get.
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