For PC gamers, performance offered on the current crop of game consoles leaves a bit to be desired. While there are many games that run at 60 FPS, that high frame rate comes at the expense of graphics fidelity. Then we have games like Destiny 2, which should be 60 FPS, but are not, because the CPUs found in both the PlayStation and Xbox are too under-powered.
Fortunately, it’s beginning to look like the next-gen consoles are not going to suffer the same kind of crippled framerates. Someone over at reddit who’s been making some accurate guesstimates so far on Sony’s next console has continued to leak out some information, but the only bit that really drew our attention was the fact that an AMD Ryzen processor could be found inside.
AMD’s Ryzen 2700X 8-core processor
As it stands, the rumor is that an eight-core Ryzen CPU will power the PlayStation 5, which would represent a huge upgrade over the very aged APU in the current PlayStation and Xbox (including the X and Pro). Even if clock speeds have to drop, versus desktop processors, the upgrade will be immense, removing the biggest bottleneck from the system. The GPUs in the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro are suitable enough to deliver a game like Destiny 2 at 60 FPS, but again, Bungie claims it’s the CPU that’s held things back.
Ultimately, that means that even if the GPU performance was kept the same from this to the next gen, the CPU upgrade alone would make for a dramatic improvement. But of course, those graphics solutions won’t remain the same; they’ll also experience an upgrade, which means that on the whole, the PlayStation 5 (if this rumor proves true) will be vastly more powerful than the current consoles.
Because graphics performance needs to increase a significant margin, it seems unlikely that AMD is going to craft another special part that has some super powerful IGP inside. Instead, discrete graphics are going to have to be used, and honestly, if we had a solution like the new RX 590 under the hood, it’d deliver great performance over the current consoles.
Naturally, both Microsoft and Sony are going to continue harping on the fact that 4K is amazing, even though it absolutely tanks the performance. So, I don’t expect that the PS5 or next Xbox will be any better suited for 4K than the current-gen consoles are for current games, which means 4K/60 is going to be a pipe dream for any game with complex graphics. It’d be nice if both Sony and Microsoft incorporated graphics choices better with the next-gen units; for example: offering people to play at 1080p/60 with max detail, 4K/30 with medium detail, or 1440p/60 with high detail.
I’m the kind of idiot who purchases a PlayStation 4 Pro based on the assumption that Destiny 2 would “have to” support 60 FPS, so I am not exactly interested in the next-gen consoles, but… I am interested in seeing that ecosystem get a whole lot better, without ridiculous performance restrictions.