The only thing that worries me about next-gen consoles of the future would be the power requirements, i can't remember exactly but someone posted a nvidia graphics card, the thing was a monster as in size, it was like a frigging bus.
Power requirements for 10th-gen systems should be within the ballpark of where the current top-end consoles are, maybe even lower, if a combination of chiplets/PIM memory/PNM & PIM design/lower-power (but more in number) CPU cores are utilized in their designs. Switching to HBM (HBM-PIM in particular) absolutely would help a ton there as well.
No hardware company will be able to quickly put a GPU chip on board within one year of it's release. Where are you getting 'just like this gen' from? AMD had been working on their RDNA 2 for years.
They've also been working on RDNA3 for years, too, though, as well as RDNA4.
Of course I'm talking about the RT and MIL. That's going to take center stage. It's just that AMD wasn't ready for it. Even Nvidia's initial designs aren't powerful enough for a full RT pipeline (with low samples) targeting 60FPS.
Not yet, but it also depends on what level of graphics fidelity we're talking about and don't forget, game budgets also play a big role in how much of the hardware is tapped as well. You could probably get 4K60 for the Nvidia marbles demo on a 3090 if some texture and geometry settings were turned down. I mean right now that same demo can do 4K48 on the same GPU paired with a 5950
And that's where things get screwy with predictions. These chips take time to develop and you are suggesting that AMD will use designs from 2025 to put into consoles that will be released 3 years later? I'm not buying that. Also, while all of these patents and rumors look great in articles, until we have something actually released they are vaporware. I also do not expect everything to follow a linear timeline fashion. Life never works that way.
To the bolded? Yes. Because whatever GPU design AMD has for 2025 (or 2026), will have been in the works for years prior to that, and Sony & Microsoft would be aware of those designs to some level. Like someone above said, just look at the RDNA2 turnaround; the consoles released the same year as those GPUs hit the market.
Even for a worst-case scenario, the 10th-gen consoles should be able to leverage technological features, and hit somewhere within high-mid to mid-high perf-wise, whatever AMD GPUs are on the market by 2025 (or 2026, if RDNA5 is a bit later down the line).
I don't see RTX 60x series boards being released before a PS6. That's way too fast turn around for such complicated processes. You are assuming an exact 2yr new product cycle timeline with nothing added in for entropy in the world and I just don't see that happening even if that was the past.
It really comes down to timing for RTX 40x series (we know those will start launching later this year) and RTX 50x series (probably 2025 at earliest). So at the worst-case scenario, RTX 60x series would start releasing within the same year as PS6 & Series X2 launching (assuming they are 2028).
That's even with considering entropic issues.
I can assure you that even a RTX-6x won't be enough to render today's CG visuals in real time. We have a LONG way to go for that. And I mean LONG.
Again IMO I think it depends on what demands the graphical assets call for, and game budget & development time. RTX 60x series won't need to be powerful enough to do today's CGI in real-time, because the top-end AAA games will have the budgets and time afforded to them to where artistic liberties can be used alongside technical prowess to "fake" visual fidelity on par with the CGI we have in movies today, in real-time visuals.
Especially from certain studios I'm sure, like Naughty Dog, Guerrilla Games, Sony Santa Monica, maybe The Coalition, Rockstar etc. Ask someone back in 2013 if they ever thought something like TLOU2 would be able to look as good as it does or even run on a base PS4 and they'd probably had said no, and yet it ended up happening.
So you guys use the 2yr cycle of upgraded GPUs in order to predict the consoles power range. You assume that if there is a 6yr gap, that Nvidia will have put out 3 generations of boards by that time and then you take the previous generation boards to assume the consoles will be using that. Thereby maintaining only a 1 generation behind tech and assuming that costs will significantly drop for previous gen whenever something new comes out. Essentially when a 4x00 series board comes out, the 3x00 series board should be discounted over 50-70% less simply because it's a new gen?
Well from what I understand, GPU manufacturers like AMD and Nvidia have obscene profit margins on their GPUs, which makes sense. We never actually learn what the actual production costs for the GPUs are, but we can take guesses.
We also know that the pricing of some components, like RAM, are easier to figure out and have a certain ebb & flow, and general curve to price reduction over time depending on the type of RAM, the capacity, etc. I'm willing to admit that the 2-year cadence could end up a 3-year cadence for certain GPU generations going forward, but yes, I generally expect the 10th-gen consoles would be no further than 1 generation behind in terms of certain specific GPU features.
They won't be able to compete with the top end or maybe even the high mid-end of whatever AMD or Nvidia GPUs are out on the market by the time they launch, but they should be able to compete with whatever's mid-low to high-low on the market from those companies by that point. Maybe low-low in the worst-case scenario.
Which, relatively speaking, should put them around whatever was in the upper low-end range of the GPUs the gen prior on the market before their release. And that's before considering other design features of 10th-gen systems that could be capitalized on (HBM-PIM memory, PIM & PNM-based architectures, more advanced data flow & locality management for I/O in the systems, etc.) that may not have the same presence in the PC space, helping console performance that much further.
If that's the case, that's why most people were off on their predictions this generation. Nothing in life is that linear and that steady. Every new generation is completely different in both timeline and scale than the previous one. Limits are reached with particular designs, costs can rise exponentially and manufacturing isn't linear either.
But a lot of the things I'm suggesting 10th-gen consoles should consider design-wise, aren't based on following rigid patterns lacking flexibility. In fact a lot of the tech in particular are things fitting with addressing remaining bottlenecks in enclosed and embedded systems, to tighten performance, and offering leniency to where some of the dependencies relied on too much this gen (small node availability among them) can be reduced to some degree for the next console generation.
I genuinely think at least some of these technological features have a very strong shot of making it into at least one company's 10th-gen systems. Take HBM for example; Microsoft are already on record stating they considered it for Series X and S, but JEDEC took too long for approval (I'm assuming for standardization of HBM2E?), though that could've been a cover for the associated costs or maybe any HBM talk was in regards for Series X units in Azure server clusters.
But due to those complications, they eventually settled on GDDR6. I'm sure Sony also considered HBM-based memories in some form for PS5 but for their own reasons also settled on GDDR6. So I wouldn't be surprised if one or both of them chose HBM as the memory standard for their 10th-gen platforms, and if they're willing to do that, they might as well be willing to consider some HBM-PIM type memory for even better performance metrics at only slightly more costs which could be balanced out by saving on costs on some other performance metric of the system in isolation.
