Former Xbox executive Albert Penello has said that unlike the current generation of consoles, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are unlikely to receive mid-gen upgrades à la PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.
Over on ResetEra (via Wccftech), Penello opined that releasing the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X made sense because 4K displays became more popular around the time and base consoles weren’t outputting the resolution that TVs are now capable of supporting. However, despite the rapid increase in 4K, Penello doesn’t think people will be as quick to adapt 8K displays.
4K was becoming a mainstream resolution for PC and TVs, and the the base consoles were designed around driving 1080p (or less) output. When you have a set that requires 4x the performance just to drive 4x the pixels, then you eat up all the performance just driving resolution. I think it’s unlikely we’ll see 8K TVs go mainstream in the same way we saw 4K go mainstream – we’re more likely to see improvements in NITS (to drive better HDR) or better framerates to support greater than 60 fps on TVs. CPUs and GPUs in the next-gen should easily support higher frame rates and wider colors. So the mid-gen upgrades are not only less financially and technically viable, but also likely less necessary to keep up with display technologies.
In addition to this, Penello said that he doesn’t foresee 20/24 teraflop machines in affordable console form anytime soon.
“The node change from 7nm to 5nm or 3nm is going to be cost-prohibitive and just mathematically, unless they hit 3nm, you’re only going to see a 30 percent reduction in size but you’re doubling the teraflops so the chip has to grow,” he explained. “Additionally, you can’t really double the GPU without growing CPU and Memory or you run into other bottlenecks which further adds cost.”
What do our readers think?
