Sony PS6, Microsoft neXt Series - 10th gen console speculation [2020]

[Charlietus]

Yes. We are increasingly moving towards edge compute and more investment in this space will drive even lower latencies and more efficient use of bandwidth. It is a fundamental requirement to move the world towards real-time applications over cloud.

It is one of the core reasons why 5G networks latency is about 4-5ms. Research on 6G networks started 5 years ago and is expected it will be about 100us -1ms. Bandwidth up to 1Tb/s. these next generation mobile networks are completely designed around edge deployments to achieve the speeds that is required while keeping costs much more manageable for telcos.

As we move towards consistent 4K 8K video streaming, you can’t be hauling all that data from data centre to clients. The entire network will explode, there’s just not enough bandwidth to support it.

I can’t comment on your 6E issues. It’s a bit like trying to diagnose someone’s computer issues without seeing it. I have no idea how you setup your 6E and what devices are paired with it etc. any poorly implemented network will perform badly. The reason wired is still solid is because those headaches are removed entirely.

And consumer gear, to be frank, sucks. Major reliability problems.

Maybe 6G will have 0 latency, but unless providers begin offering unlimited data at low prices, no one will deplete their 100GB to play the latest high end game for 3 hours.
Can you imagine downloading something at 100GB/s and finishing your gigabytes in 1 second? It's an oxymoron.

The problem with my network is that the walls are thick brick walls, so unless i rebuild my house it's not going to change in this century or something

Those are fundamental issues for the great majority of people that really can't be addressed in any reasonable way, while traditional gaming in right there, accessible and easy for everyone.

 

[iroboto]

Maybe 6G will have 0 latency, but unless providers begin offering unlimited data at low prices, no one will deplete their 100GB to play the latest high end game for 3 hours.
Can you imagine downloading something at 100GB/s and finishing your gigabytes in 1 second? It's an oxymoron.

The problem with my network is that the walls are thick brick walls, so unless i rebuild my house it's not going to change in this century or something

Those are fundamental issues for the great majority of people that really can't be addressed in any reasonable way, while traditional gaming in right there, accessible and easy for everyone.

We are getting to that point. Data rates continue to fall over time.

For dedicated household instances, 6G may be more viable than fibre just based on infrastructure costs, and these home internet on 5G plans are unlimited but with the restriction that the router cannot move its position, so effectively they lock access to only a few cell towers.

Every solution is not without its problems, they will be addressed in time provided the cost is lower. But traditional gaming as it is, has a cost problem. The industry is trying to do its best to lower costs, but the trend so far is that things are getting pricier and not cheaper. When things get too expensive, people will not upgrade or they will disengage entirely.

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

How much of an issue is data centre proximity, and would privately owned consoles being shareable (when otherwise not in use) improve that at all?

 

[Charlietus]

We are getting to that point. Data rates continue to fall over time.

For dedicated household instances, 6G may be more viable than fibre just based on infrastructure costs, and these home internet on 5G plans are unlimited but with the restriction that the router cannot move its position, so effectively they lock access to only a few cell towers.

Every solution is not without its problems, they will be addressed in time provided the cost is lower. But traditional gaming as it is, has a cost problem. The industry is trying to do its best to lower costs, but the trend so far is that things are getting pricier and not cheaper. When things get too expensive, people will not upgrade or they will disengage entirely.

I can't talk about the world, but in Italy, since Iliad has come over, prices have hit rock bottom 3 or 4 years ago, and aside from the lower end providers that offer 100gb in 4g at 5€ a month (that's the one I have), mostly 6-7€ usually, any 5g offer has been going up in price. They sweeten the deal by offering you more gigabytes, but we are talking 130gb to 180gb a month from 9€ to 10€, nowhere near unlimited. And unless operational costs go down somehow, providers have reached the limit.

Wind3 has an offer for unlimited 5g for 35€ a month

 

[Charlietus]

How much of an issue is data centre proximity, and would privately owned consoles being shareable (when otherwise not in use) improve that at all?

Shareable consoles would be a cool idea, but at that point you are at the mercy of the user having a good network...

Also, many people using the same network, which creates even more problems in cloud gaming for both the provider and the user.

 

[iroboto]

Wind3 has an offer for unlimited 5g for 35€ a month

Oh. I pay that amount but for 100GB a month. And that’s cheap here!

 

[iroboto]

How much of an issue is data centre proximity, and would privately owned consoles being shareable (when otherwise not in use) improve that at all?

Some older models like that would be like local arcades and PC cafes.

Data Center proximity is the largest issue for latency and a natural barrier for real-time applications. Its the difference between 1-10km for edge compute vs hundreds or thousands of kilometres for data centers.

 

[Charlietus]

Oh. I pay that amount but for 100GB a month. And that’s cheap here!

That is some outrageous pricing, where are you from? (If you don't mind me asking).

 

[iroboto]

That is some outrageous pricing, where are you from?

Canada.
lol. Yea we have some of the worst rates. It’s a population density issue. Too big a place to cover and too few people paying for the infrastructure. It’s come down quite a bit already, but still a ways to go. The upside is that service is pretty good. We get pretty close to advertised speeds, the level of over subscription is less than compared to some places in US.

It can be cheaper, I’ve seen about 20 euro for 250GB but those tend to be national plans for Canada. But I need high speed roaming plans for US/Canada.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It is one of the core reasons why 5G networks latency is about 4-5ms.

We've discussed latency before. The limiting factors isn't so much speed of signals as how many hops you have to do and the whole backbone. I guess if you could link directly to the source, you could get latency down to single digit ms.

 

[Charlietus]

Canada.
lol. Yea we have some of the worst rates. It’s a population density issue. Too big a place to cover and too few people paying for the infrastructure. It’s come down quite a bit already, but still a ways to go. The upside is that service is pretty good. We get pretty close to advertised speeds, the level of over subscription is less than compared to some places in US.

It can be cheaper, I’ve seen about 20 euro for 250GB but those tend to be national plans for Canada. But I need high speed roaming plans for US/Canada.

20€ for 250gb is already more acceptable, but if we don't get to, say, a terabyte for 10€/$, cloud gaming will always be niche. And we aren't getting that anytime soon. I expect 6G to be even costlier than 5G, especially at the start. It's always an uphill battle.

 

[iroboto]

We've discussed latency before. The limiting factors isn't so much speed of signals as how many hops you have to do and the whole backbone. I guess if you could link directly to the source, you could get latency down to single digit ms.

Yup.the idea here is to continually get closer to source. A bit like $L0 cache. Gotta get it all the way down, bandwidth and latency is extremely fast. Keep the working realtime, high bandwidth, low latency, traffic away from the data centers (VRAM).

They can get below 1ms in the near future. Literature and expos I’ve been to, all point into this direction.

 

[iroboto]

20€ for 250gb is already more acceptable, but if we don't get to, say, a terabyte for 10€/$, cloud gaming will always be niche. And we aren't getting that anytime soon. I expect 6G to be even costlier than 5G, especially at the start. It's always an uphill battle.

Yup, the telcos have to find new ways of monetizing the cost of deployments. Faster speeds etc. as soon as they build something specifically for gaming rating streaming, it will be costly. It’s the type of traffic people will pay premium amounts for IOT, networked self driving cars etc.

They already separate 5G into 2 categories: 5G and 5G+ here. The latter having near spec speeds, the former being slightly faster than LTE.

 

[Frenetic Pony]

Yup, the telcos have to find new ways of monetizing the cost of deployments. Faster speeds etc. as soon as they build something specifically for gaming rating streaming, it will be costly. It’s the type of traffic people will pay premium amounts for IOT, networked self driving cars etc.

They already separate 5G into 2 categories: 5G and 5G+ here. The latter having near spec speeds, the former being slightly faster than LTE.

The "5g..." is a tech differential, you do need to have different antenna in your phone and they do need to have different antenna in the towers. That being said it's a bit weird to get squeezed for "Xg" and "Xg+", usually that's just luck of the draw in the US whether the tower your near happens to have which antenna.

 

[rntongo]

Maybe 6G will have 0 latency, but unless providers begin offering unlimited data at low prices, no one will deplete their 100GB to play the latest high end game for 3 hours.
Can you imagine downloading something at 100GB/s and finishing your gigabytes in 1 second? It's an oxymoron.

The problem with my network is that the walls are thick brick walls, so unless i rebuild my house it's not going to change in this century or something

Those are fundamental issues for the great majority of people that really can't be addressed in any reasonable way, while traditional gaming in right there, accessible and easy for everyone.

The other issue is the load on the gaming servers. It makes a lot of sense for a future with a hybrid set up. Something people dont know is even when you pay for your own "dedicated" server, its just a virtual instance so its still affected if the hw servers are overloaded. Its not economical to a cloud computing firm to dedicate the hw to a specific consumer. This is why enterpise customers are moving towards a hybrid cloud approach for example. The same will likely happen with AAA gaming. Some consumers will simply connect to a remote server whenever they want to play, others will simply connect to their console at home similar to the playstation portal, if they are on the move. For $500 you can get your own dedicated gaming machine which you can access remotely when not at home with almost zero issues. Or just pay for a tiered subscription similar to Stadia. So a hybrid approach is most realistic even with higher network bandwidth and lower latency it makes sense for a sizeable portion of the gaming market to have their own hw at home which they can access remotely as well.

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

The other issue is the load on the gaming servers. It makes a lot of sense for a future with a hybrid set up. Something people dont know is even when you pay for your own "dedicated" server, its just a virtual instance so its still affected if the hw servers are overloaded. Its not economical to a cloud computing firm to dedicate the hw to a specific consumer. This is why enterpise customers are moving towards a hybrid cloud approach for example. The same will likely happen with AAA gaming. Some consumers will simply connect to a remote server whenever they want to play, others will simply connect to their console at home similar to the playstation portal, if they are on the move. For $500 you can get your own dedicated gaming machine which you can access remotely when not at home with almost zero issues. Or just pay for a tiered subscription similar to Stadia. So a hybrid approach is most realistic even with higher network bandwidth and lower latency it makes sense for a sizeable portion of the gaming market to have their own hw at home which they can access remotely as well.

It's for this sort of reason I'd love to see next gen consoles capable of running at least two instances of games.

What form that would take, I don't know exactly. Perhaps a two tier launch, in which the higher tier is two base APU's glued together. Perhaps a single tier launch, but it can run two instances of previous generations.

Given that MS fumbled the two tier approach and Sony's single tier launch has worked well, I think the latter is more likely. And a 16c32t CPU + 72CU GPU seems a pretty reasonable minimum bar.

 

[turkey]

It's for this sort of reason I'd love to see next gen consoles capable of running at least two instances of games.

What form that would take, I don't know exactly. Perhaps a two tier launch, in which the higher tier is two base APU's glued together. Perhaps a single tier launch, but it can run two instances of previous generations.

Given that MS fumbled the two tier approach and Sony's single tier launch has worked well, I think the latter is more likely. And a 16c32t CPU + 72CU GPU seems a pretty reasonable minimum bar.

Why not just expect a player to buy two consoles if they wish to host a server also?

This is exactly how it was for the original Xbox. I believe Tom Clancey Rainbow Six had this for various releases. Friends had a 2nd Xbox , game and live account I believe to expand the number of players supported in a match and improved performance as no longer peer to peer.

I doubt they would, but the current Series S would be good as a dedicated server. Plenty of CPU grunt if it was just running as a game server, also dirt cheap to pickup.

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

Why not just expect a player to buy two consoles if they wish to host a server also?

This is exactly how it was for the original Xbox. I believe Tom Clancey Rainbow Six had this for various releases. Friends had a 2nd Xbox , game and live account I believe to expand the number of players supported in a match and improved performance as no longer peer to peer.

I doubt they would, but the current Series S would be good as a dedicated server. Plenty of CPU grunt if it was just running as a game server, also dirt cheap to pickup.

Because 2 consoles couldn't be utilised as a single, doubly powerful console.

It would also allow for splitscreen, whether playing the same game or two different games.

 

[vjPiedPiper]

Could consoles have some form of local framegen based on the remote stream?
firestick and phones etc. get the raw stream version of xCloud, consoles with more GPU get xCloud + Framegen + maybe some better AA for local display on a tv.

 

[Newguy]

Could consoles have some form of local framegen based on the remote stream?
firestick and phones etc. get the raw stream version of xCloud, consoles with more GPU get xCloud + Framegen + maybe some better AA for local display on a tv.

I guess they could but from what I've used there can be significant artifacting, especially in faster moving games where it looks like a mediocre youtube video from the few I've tried. I wouldn't want to see what framegen does on top of that if the quality is similar although it's been a year or two since I've tried it so it might've changed