I think twice the performance compared to current console hardware is not enough to make a spectacular difference at the console level. RT? If they wanted a pro console because of Ray-tracing, that alone cannot mass sell that new console. Ray-tracing does not make a significant visual difference in every game compared to the traditional cubemap technique.
I think it's totally pointless. Considering that the Xbox Series and PS5 consoles are only just starting to really take advantage of SSD I/O performance. In addition, using UE5's TSR, you can achieve pretty good visuals with current consoles.
The rumours are that it could be $499 at launch. A big if, as everything about this supposed console needs to be prefaced with at this point sure, but if so - a doubling of performance for the same retail price 4 years later? That's on the upper end of improvements you can expect in PC GPU's across
2 generations for the same msrp.
Doubling of performance would mean 30fps fidelity modes now become the new performance modes. Performance modes could be the new 120fps mode. Yes, there's CPU bottlenecks that prevent the PS5 from reaching that in games now - but even assuming no clock speed increase, the massive jump from Zen2 to Zen4 will bring significant IPC boosts. That, and potentially a machine-learning implementation of reconstruction, and potentially frame generation. It is not impossible to imagine in late 2024, a 30dps Fidelity mode game could be made 100+ fps with frame gen.
All that being said, the purpose of these new consoles isn't necessarily to pressure the existing userbase to 'upgrade', some will sure - but it's to entice new buyers to join the ecosystem. You will have a choice to spend $150-$200 more to get a substantially better system. No different upsell than any other consumer electronics.
I mean yeah I guess. I would not be in Xbox ecosystem again without the S. But the cons are just very annoying to have to consider with all these skus both from consumer perspective and dev perspective
The increased development effort is relatively trivial in comparison to the PC, who's development teams are usually much smaller wrt AAA releases. So from the perspective of needing software tailored to unique hardware, Xbox would have ~3 SKU's, PS5 two. If that's a huge development hurdle, PC gaming would not exist.
