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

[QPlayer]

Regarding nextgen consoles, two factors will be decisive. One of them is their pricing, which will make them deviate from the category that is traditionally still affordable for the general public, and even higher. In other words, there will certainly be expensive console variants, necessarily, because technological developments can only be followed with more expensive components today. Of course, in addition to this, there will also be variants with lower performance, but those are not the ones that someone will go for if they want to present the maximum graphics skills of the new consoles. In my view, they will therefore copy the segmented hardware philosophy of the PC market more than ever.

Another significant factor will be the effect of image and framerate tuning techniques on visual performance. Today, everyone still talks about the raster performance when looking at the graphics capabilities of a machine, but this will soon change. The latest VGA generation will illustrate this well. AI-enhanced frames and improved image quality will be more decisive than ever. Once they reach the minimum input lag, from then on nobody will care that that computer is actually only calculating 10-20% of the graphics on the screen and the rest is AI "magic".

 

[raytracingfan]

Path tracing is also not gonna feel like such a crazy upgrade when ray traced GI becomes pretty common this generation already, as it's already starting to be. It'll be a nice, but modest improvement. That alone wont remotely justify calling something 'next generation', unless we're seriously watering down that term to be so much less than it used to mean. We've gotten quite good improvements to lighting quality every generation for a while now, but that's generally been accompanied by sizeable improvements in many other aspects of the visuals as well. Without those other sizeable improvements, you're just putting lipstick on a pig. Again, there's still so much room for improvement in visuals outside things that ray/path tracing can help with. Those things cant just be neglected.

Ray tracing can improve more than just lighting. Once RT is used for primary visibility, depth-of-field and motion blur effects superior to the current post processing effects can be implemented. Occlusion culling is no longer necessary with RT primary visibility. Order-independent transparency can be handled elegantly. And with RTX Mega Geometry (or the inevitable AMD/cross-IHV equivalent), Nanite-equivalent geometric detail can be achieved without the software rasterizer.

 

[Charlietus]

If you were expecting this gen to usher in perfectly realistic graphics, I dont know what to tell you. Of course there will be compromises. Next gen machines will also require games to be full of visual compromises.

Before launch I didn't expect consoles to be this bad at ray tracing. So you have developers that clearly want to use more ray tracing, and the hardware that isn't great. Reminds me of deferred lighting in the 7th gen. And just like that gen, 9th gen is an inbetween transition where the next consoles will be much better for developers.

But what's the price point to reach those ambitions? On the playstation side, I wouldn't be surprised to see 2, maybe three consoles all at launch.
The biggest bottleneck for the PS5 is the price, so Sony is going to come prepared I assume.

 

[Boss]

Ray tracing can improve more than just lighting. Once RT is used for primary visibility, depth-of-field and motion blur effects superior to the current post processing effects can be implemented. Occlusion culling is no longer necessary with RT primary

For all the many cross gen games we had for a long time, sure, but there's a significant leap in overall presentation values with plenty of the actual next gen titles we've started getting. Just because we dont have direct 1:1 screenshots to compare with non-existent last gen versions of the games doesn't mean that big leap isn't there. In fact, if you ARE showing direct comparison shots of games with old gen versions, then it's kind of implicitly NOT next gen, is it?

Path tracing is also not gonna feel like such a crazy upgrade when ray traced GI becomes pretty common this generation already, as it's already starting to be. It'll be a nice, but modest improvement. That alone wont remotely justify calling something 'next generation', unless we're seriously watering down that term to be so much less than it used to mean. We've gotten quite good improvements to lighting quality every generation for a while now, but that's generally been accompanied by sizeable improvements in many other aspects of the visuals as well. Without those other sizeable improvements, you're just putting lipstick on a pig. Again, there's still so much room for improvement in visuals outside things that ray/path tracing can help with. Those things cant just be neglected.

As we get further and further into the gen, the graphics will improve. We'll start to see projects with more recent versions of UE5 which will look better when compared to cross gen games. However, i don't think that graphics or raytracing will be the big sell people on here think it will be. In fact, I think we may even see a longer cross-gen period next gen than we saw this gen. Despite the increase in image quality, power, and frame rate, people still refused to upgrade to the ps5 as quickly as they did from ps3->ps4.

You could argue that covid hampered the progress and that's true. However, from current trends, we can see that people are playing more old games than they are new games. If the sell next gen is, more raytracing paired with static, non interactive set dressed worlds, it's going to be a seriously tough sell. The games themselves have fallen into the hollywood trap of releasing visually appealing but thoroughly uninteresting content. It just doesn't sell. More attention needs to be paid to other aspects of the games like the gameplay, physics, etc. That's where Sony and co should look to innovate/differentiate themselves from the pack.

Finally, consoles need to get back to their roots of enabling new experiences through custom dedicated programmable hardware. That doesn't necessarily mean a departure from x86 but, a new line of thinking. Sony and nintendo tried to accomplish this with their controller features with varying levels of success. They need to put more resources in that style of innovation from peripherals to dedicated blocks on their chips, etc.

 

[rntongo]

Before launch I didn't expect consoles to be this bad at ray tracing. So you have developers that clearly want to use more ray tracing, and the hardware that isn't great. Reminds me of deferred lighting in the 7th gen. And just like that gen, 9th gen is an inbetween transition where the next consoles will be much better for developers.

But what's the price point to reach those ambitions? On the playstation side, I wouldn't be surprised to see 2, maybe three consoles all at launch.
The biggest bottleneck for the PS5 is the price, so Sony is going to come prepared I assume.

When has Sony ever released 2-3 models at the same time and how would Software support work for this? Seeing how obsessed Cerny is with making development easier and cutting down the time to triangle this doesnt add up for me

 

[Seanspeed]

Ray tracing can improve more than just lighting. Once RT is used for primary visibility, depth-of-field and motion blur effects superior to the current post processing effects can be implemented. Occlusion culling is no longer necessary with RT primary visibility. Order-independent transparency can be handled elegantly. And with RTX Mega Geometry (or the inevitable AMD/cross-IHV equivalent), Nanite-equivalent geometric detail can be achieved without the software rasterizer.

I think you're heavily overestimating what RT can realistically do, or in a better manner than other techniques with many of these things, and it's quite impossible to ignore that your reasoning might be incredibly biased based on your screenname....

 

[Seanspeed]

Before launch I didn't expect consoles to be this bad at ray tracing.

Well this will be a bit harsh, but saying that just tells me you're not terribly great at understanding what specific hardware should be capable of, and thus what kind of hardware we might need for the kind of visual leaps you want to see.

It was very apparent when RDNA2 and the new consoles were announced, that the RT support would not be strong. In fact, most people were quite surprised there was any kind of hardware accelerated support for RT at all. Beyond that, even among the generally lower expectations of what RDNA2 hardware could do within these console limitations, I think there's been a number of titles that have exceeded those expectations and have shown that with some effort, getting RTGI to work even at 60fps in true next gen titles is possible. UE5 as well has made progress towards making Lumen work at 60fps on consoles. Clearly, if 30fps were still being prioritized, a fair bit more could be done still. RDNA2 is not exactly good at RT, but we've already seen it can work on these consoles and we'll undoubtedly see it more and more going forward in the next few years.

You seem to have bizarrely had very high expectations of these consoles and I dont quite know what else to say about that.

But what's the price point to reach those ambitions?

Well we're getting heavily into territory the mods dont want us to get into, even though it's invariably all interwoven together. You're very right to ask that question, though. In fact, I really think moreso than trying to talk specs, the question about the financial aspects should actually be the main priority, as everything about the tech and specs follows from that. We're clearly in a new age where we cant just make the same basic assumptions about improvements in processes and performance-per-dollar like we used to.

 

[Seanspeed]

In fact, I think we may even see a longer cross-gen period next gen than we saw this gen.

No argument there at all. With the kind of limited hardware improvements I think are realistically possible with a new console at any kind of reasonable price point in say 2028, I'm not sure there will be many games that will be justifiably exclusively next gen that couldn't be ported down to XSX/PS5. Especially if AI is doing a lot of 'enhancement' work, that leaves plenty of room to have un-enhanced versions.

 

[Charlietus]

Well this will be a bit harsh, but saying that just tells me you're not terribly great at understanding what specific hardware should be capable of, and thus what kind of hardware we might need for the kind of visual leaps you want to see.

You seem to have bizarrely had very high expectations of these consoles and I dont quite know what else to say about that.

My expectations before launch (and we didn't really have that much of a clear picture honestly) was the capability to enable one (1) ray traced effect in most games at decent resolutions (1080p and higher) at 60 fps. And I don't think that those expectations were that unrealistic.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Well we're getting heavily into territory the mods dont want us to get into, even though it's invariably all interwoven together. You're very right to ask that question, though. In fact, I really think moreso than trying to talk specs, the question about the financial aspects should actually be the main priority,

Feel free to hold those discussions in the Industry forum. This thread discusses what you'd pick for a given BOM, and doesn't try to justify that BOM - just say, "I think they'll spend this much money and get this hardware."

If you want an attempt to predict what the console companies will spend on hardware to inform your discussion in this thread on how that money will be spent, you want a new thread in Industry, "Next-gen console pricing - what do you think they'll cost and what hardware margins will they have" or somesuch.

 

[Seanspeed]

My expectations before launch (and we didn't really have that much of a clear picture honestly) was the capability to enable one (1) ray traced effect in most games at decent resolutions (1080p and higher) at 60 fps. And I don't think that those expectations were that unrealistic.

We knew that RDNA2's hardware ray tracing implementation was quite barebones.

There was not much real dedicated RT hardware, they were just repurposing the TMU to handle a small portion of the RT workload in terms of calculating actual RT 'hits' on pixels, but everything else about the RT process was still up to the main shader cores. It was a fairly weak setup.

I dont know what else to say other than that you definitely should not have expected so much from these consoles in terms of RT and there were definitely plenty of us who understood this beforehand.

 

[Seanspeed]

Feel free to hold those discussions in the Industry forum. This thread discusses what you'd pick for a given BOM, and doesn't try to justify that BOM - just say, "I think they'll spend this much money and get this hardware."

If you want an attempt to predict what the console companies will spend on hardware to inform your discussion in this thread on how that money will be spent, you want a new thread in Industry, "Next-gen console pricing - what do you think they'll cost"

It's like if somebody posted asking how to play a certain song on guitar, but a mod intervened and demanded that we have one topic about what we should do with the left hand, and a separate topic about what we should do with the right hand.