AMD and Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Shared Vision: Route to PS6?

[Nacho Libre]

This is a very interesting video that put things in perspective for me. I was thinking about getting a base, digital PS5, but hearing about the technologies that Sony (and AMD for its video cards and APUs, for that matter) is contemplating for its future consoles, I think I'll withhold from purchasing now.

Even as a PC player I will pause any major upgrades and see how these technologies come into the market in, say, 3 years' time?

Lastly, although Xbox could be looking into something similar, because they too have a partnership with AMD, I don't think they have someone of the caliber of Mark Cerny, thus, and coupled with the Game Pass debacle, I think the Series X will be my last Microsoft console.

So, what are your thoughts on the subject?

 

[Saidur_Ali]

Next-gen Xbox was meant to be targeting next year with the same base architecture as they can benefit from any large improvements Sony makes but with addition of an NPU but is looking like it might release early 2027 if given the go ahead. It should have on paper significantly more performance than a PS6 but might come at a substantially higher cost, maybe even more than double the price if they aren't subsidising it at all. I can see the PC version doing quite well as it will be very affordable compared to current systems out there for the level of performance and will have all the new architectures in likely a small form factor that is quiet. I wonder if they will miss out on any technologies by launching earlier or if they will get majority of the benefits?

PC wise, I think next year is looking great as both Intel and AMD are releasing 2nm CPUs and Nvidia hopefully releases 3nm Rubin GPUs to desktop which should be quite competitive with RDNA5 or whatever it is named so you can experience probably something significantly more performant already next year and with potentially better efficiency too. Intel might also release a discrete 3nm GPU so it seems AMD might be a bit late to the party on desktop due to big overhaul on the GPU but I think going forward, they should be in a great place as they can progress fast from that baseline. They are already launching 2nm Instinct GPUs next year so they are ahead of the competition there so they look like they are going quite aggressive in terms of rate of development due to the crazy amounts people are spending on hardware for AI with no real sign of it stopping anytime soon.

Mark Cerny mentioning it being a few years away makes it sound like their next consoles will release in 2028. It would be disappointing if they are still using N3P node then (Would be OK for dev kits to use initially so they are working with real hardware instead of simulation), hopefully they change to a 2nm node so it can be more competitive with Xbox without having to change GPU size as they will get a sizeable uptick in the same small power envelope they are targeting which will be more crucial for their handheld.

It is a long time to withhold from purchasing a platform that will likely be supported for probably well into not just the next decade but the one after that as PS5 level of performance will always be decent with handhelds having to be targeted with Switch 2 and PS6 Portable. PS5 is still competitive with most popular hardware on Steam and still faster than majority of GPUs on their hardware survey list. When it is on sale, it is a great buy as I doubt it depreciates much from that so it is almost like free hardware for a number of years. In fact, component prices appear to be currently going up so you might break even still at current sale prices a few years later if you get an 1TB one over the newer 825GB models. Remains to be seen if they will do a revision to N4C node (They should really do this as they ported a lot of the chip IP to N4P for the PS5 Pro, hoping new PS5 Pro revision is on N4C this year) but if they don't next year then it is probably going to be unlikely with PS6 releasing not too long after but even then, it is not like used PS5s will drop significantly in price to be completely worthless.

At the end of the day it is just better lighting, upscaling and compression technologies. There are games on PC that already offer these options but will be good to see how creative devs are with it when there is more hardware that is capable of it. The games will likely all need to run well on a handheld so probably games will be targeting PS5 Power Saver mode going forward instead of PS4 for multi-platform games. I just hope games start taking more advantage of current PS5 as baseline instead of PS4 without it getting to the stage of only when the PS6 is releasing. That would be disappointing as it will be like a whole generation wasted. Hopefully there is a new GT game long before PS6 launches, it is unfortunate gameplay has been stuck to 2013 budget console levels for so long.