Do you think there will be a mid gen refresh console from Sony and Microsoft?

Aren't RAM prices a bit of a sticking point for a mid gen refresh? In 3-4 years prices won't have reduced enough to include significantly more RAM.

Faster frame rates don't need it, if that's the selling point? Better raytracing does?

 

It depends . If they stick with AMD and they continue down the route of Infinity cache it might not be a big deal. The 6800xt has 128megs but perhaps 256megs of stacked cache would keep chip size down and still allow for slower less costly ram in consoles. MS already did a split design. Maybe we will see that combined in the refresh.

RDNA 3/4 with 256 megs infinity cache with a split pool of say 16/8 gigs of ram ?

 

Do we really need more ram? Consoles have gone fully into streaming. Fast ssd alleviates ram pressure. Consoles will still keep being 4k and possibly scale to 8k so resolution increases will not be driving memory consumption higher. It could be more beneficial to add even faster ssd and even better compression to console than adding more ram.

 

Of course. These are off the shelf parts that can be replaced with newer off the shelf parts for not too much more in cost or r&d. However it lets them kickstart a whole new marketing platform and keep the ASP high.

 

There won’t be a mid gen refresh.

Cost per transistor does not come down anymore. Current gen is too expensive already.

 

I believe into rolling generations. New console every 3-5 years similar to new phone model every year. Rolling generation is BC and more of the same. Depending what consumers can stomach the new consoles could come into higher price points while current and previous gen consoles hold cheaper price points.

Only reason to do new generation in my mind is that if machine learning in games really takes off in future. It could be that "next gen" would have ridiculously fast accelerator for machine learning providing fancy ways to scale textures, buffers, cancel noise, animate, increase framerate etc. If this happens then the heavily machine learnt games would have no chance on running in old hw.

For example textures in ssd could be first decompressed, then processed(upscale+add detail) via dnn and then used by gpu. This potentially could save a ton of disk space while moving the cost to dnn processing. Texture upscale should be easier problem than what dlss tries to solve. Games could use material specific dnn's to upscale or even hallucinate(procedural) textures.

edit. Jim Keller talked about using dnn's to render graphics in lex fridmann podcast. He seemed to be optimistic that rendering would be done via machine learning in future. When that happens is anybody's guess.

 

That's my thought too if "everything" would be normal.

But then there is the extremely dangerous political, social, economical and geo-strategical situation which might lead to an outcome we have far more serious concerns than some console.

I know gaming is pure escapism but if we discuss the "future" here when the "future" isn't guaranteed for "everybody" anymore it needs to be said.