Friday, February 16th 2024
Next-gen Games Consoles Predicted to Cost More or Offer Smaller Performance Uplift
Hiroki Totoki—Chief Operating Officer (COO) and president of Sony Group Corporation—expressed slight disappointment in PlayStation 5's Q3Y23 sales performance. The console's lifetime total (since November 2020) hit an impressive 50 million units sold milestone last December, but Sony's top brass had set an aggressive target of 25 million PS5 units sold through the fiscal year of 2023. A recent company earnings call highlighted a revised sales goal of 21 million units, and the PlayStation top executive's uneasy outlook for the fourth quarter and beyond. Genki Japan parsed this information into an easy to digest Tweet: "Sony COO Totoki said that it is harder to grow profits on the PS5 as the life cycle goes on in comparison to previous generations. With previous gens as time went on it became cheaper to produce them. But with PS5 the parts are becoming more expensive as the life cycle goes on."
Well known hardware tipster—Kepler_L2—followed up on Genki's brief report with an insight into semiconductor conditions (current day and in times ahead): "Cost per transistor has remained flat through FinFETs and will go up with GAAFETs/CFETs. The days of free cost savings with die shrinks is over and things will only get worse. Future consoles will either have increasingly smaller performance gains or significantly higher prices." Kepler_L2 has a pretty good track record of covering unreleased AMD CPU and GPU technologies, particularly in the field of Sony and Microsoft gaming hardware—they were last seen weighing in on the matter of speculated PlayStation 5 Pro specifications. Industry observers believe that the proper next-generation PlayStation and Xbox consoles will launch with insides occupied by Team Red-designed tech, despite early 2024 rumblings of NVIDIA and Intel pitching in with shopped proposals.
Sources:
Kepler_L2 Tweet, Wccftech, Eurogamer, Sony Meeting Notes
Well known hardware tipster—Kepler_L2—followed up on Genki's brief report with an insight into semiconductor conditions (current day and in times ahead): "Cost per transistor has remained flat through FinFETs and will go up with GAAFETs/CFETs. The days of free cost savings with die shrinks is over and things will only get worse. Future consoles will either have increasingly smaller performance gains or significantly higher prices." Kepler_L2 has a pretty good track record of covering unreleased AMD CPU and GPU technologies, particularly in the field of Sony and Microsoft gaming hardware—they were last seen weighing in on the matter of speculated PlayStation 5 Pro specifications. Industry observers believe that the proper next-generation PlayStation and Xbox consoles will launch with insides occupied by Team Red-designed tech, despite early 2024 rumblings of NVIDIA and Intel pitching in with shopped proposals.
32 Comments on Next-gen Games Consoles Predicted to Cost More or Offer Smaller Performance Uplift
That sounds wonderful.
As well can all agree on, GPUs are way too cheap right now. Companies like Nvidia are probably just weeks away from filing bankruptcy. They really need to charge more for their graphics cards.
:p
You'd get slim models on the back 9 of the product life cycle but that was it.
Come on intel/samsung/glofo?/china.
There are a lot of console buyers, so even price increases won't make them move to a PC imo as that would be an even bigger price cost.
Basically, go all out in making the next-gen consoles a "Pro Edition" from the start, and mid-cycle refreshes would instead be cooler due to improvements in production, much like what was done in the PS1-PS3 era, with mid-cycle refreshes producing slimmer, cooler-running consoles with near-identical performance (backwards compatibility aside in the case of the latter PS3s). Or if they want, make use of production refinements to push both a power mode and an efficiency mode on the refreshed console, kind of like what the PS4 Pro did offer in some games. In this case, a Performance Mode that uses improvements to further push gaming quality while maintaining the same maximum operating temperature levels of the release-gen console, or an Efficiency Mode that keeps things at the same level of performance as the release-gen console, but with lower heat output.
The other possibility is maybe making the GPU element upgradable, kind of like the Frameworks laptops and other experimental one-off laptops that allowed GPU upgrades. In this case, making use of a proprietary, slotted mobile GPU. Either the old GPU can be swapped out, or the console would have the expansion bay built-in and can swap over to using the new GPU while either shifting APU resources towards the CPU cores (providing a processing boost) or repurpose the iGPUs for light AI purposes.
Sure, you could bring 120Hz gaming to consoles but that's not realistically going to happen sadly - games won't support it because of general lazyness to patch things to unlock performance - what will be the Pro model selling point exactly?
The PS6 having a smaller performance uplift will be absolutely fine.Fucking idiots, they had an amazingly successful launch because the market conditions were completely abnormal - pandemic and crypto boom making gpus unobtanium - and they rode that while they could. But those conditions are no more and game releases have been very uninteresting, they set themselves up for failure lol
Its a strategy that can be adapted. And the advances now arent that fast anymore. We made a jump, but that was yesteryear.
Its a matter of choices.
The die shrink days having a massive impact on performance are gone it's been innovation like chiplets that's exciting. They have known for year's now what way the industry was heading let's hope they have planned accordingly.
But tbh only consoles I'm remotely interested in is the switch 2 and whenever the new steam deck comes out. Switch and steam deck made the ps5 and xbsx obsolete for me to the point I've sold them my PC is more than enough for that big screen experience. Personally for me the market shifted I hope Xbox and play station can keep up.
I think now PS5 and Xbox are both Ryzen/NVME as standard, they could get away with not releasing a new gen for a while, graphics are easy, just down scale to the GPU as well as skipping or minimising RT which is a resource hog. With some foresight they maybe could have implemented some kind of external PCIe connector.
Maybe less performant consoles would help with optimization even on PC.
Doubt it will happen though, more likely consoles will become thin-client machines for game streaming, with only an upscaling chip in them.