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After reading the more detailed Wired article, I can assuredly place myself in the "cautiously optimistic" car of the hype train for the PS5 (I myself own a PS4

After reading the more detailed Wired article, I can assuredly place myself in the "cautiously optimistic" car of the hype train for the PS5 (I myself own a PS4 Pro that I've been happy with). There are a lot of solid boxes that Sony's ticking: backwards compatibility with the previous generation, sticking with physical game copies instead of moving towards a "games-as-a-service" cloud model, updates to hardware that justify the new console's number increment, releasing devkits early to get game devs on board with said hardware, etc. That being said, as others have mentioned, the support for 8K stupifies me. As far as I understand it, 8K displays are only just now becoming commercial, and only for the highest buyers. I'd much rather have higher, consistent framerates. Ray-tracing, I'm indifferent to. If they can make it work, great, more reflective windows and puddles for all. If not, then perhaps game devs can choose not to implement it. Shame there will be no additional information on this at E3. Makes me wonder if they're saving their winning hand for a future round of poker, so to speak. Edit: spelling

abrawill 7y ago
8K output support doesn't really cost much so I wouldn't worry about it. It doesn't matter to most of the GPU internals. Games will internally run at whatever resolution they think results in the best quality/responsiveness/fluidity/development-cost trade-off, supporting 8K doesn't change anything there.
- fisherwithac 7y ago
  Fair enough. My concerns were more rooted in performance than the cost of the console itself. But the performance gains they reported by switching to an SSD would more than likely trump anything lost by supporting higher resolutions.
  - awill 7y ago
    there's nothing 'lost' by supporting higher resolutions. It will render internally at (say) 4k, and upsample to 8k.
  - abrawill 7y ago
    Agreed! I'd say the SSD is a real, literal, game changer. Extra resolution is just more of the same really.
jsight 7y ago
I'm assuming that there are basically two reasons to support 8K now. One is that it gets them higher resolution for a potential future VR headset. The other is that it is bigger than 4K and that sounds good in their marketing.
- BenMorganIO 7y ago
  I suspect it's more for VR and 8k bump on output is cheap compared to helping Samsung and LG sell their 8k models.
- fisherwithac 7y ago
  Another possible reason, now that I think about it more, is future proofing. If that's the case, then props for forward thinking on their part. Recently on a whim I decided to plug in my N64 to a 1080p TV, and I was surprised how terribly the graphics scaled to the higher resolution.
  - seiferteric 7y ago
    My understanding is it's not just the resolution, but CRT vs LCD. N64 looks best on a a CRT.
    - monocasa 7y ago
      The N64 is also mainly hampered by it's texture memory. You only have 4KB total to play with for a texture (it's manually managed memory, not a cache) and with mipmaping, that's effectively 2KB. That's one 32x32 picture at 16bit color. Additionally, developers didn't have a great handle on how the more modern memory hierarchy (read high DRAM latency) affected things yet so a lot of techniques they used sort of fought against the architecture and led to low resolutions, and they used heavy blurring and antialiasing to compensate.
      - klodolph 7y ago
        To add to this, this is why GoldenEye N64 has so many grayscale textures... they use less memory.
the_duke 7y ago
All of the changes are pretty much expected and even mandatory for justifying a new generation, especially with the spec boost we saw mid generation. Nothing disappointing, but also nothing surprising/exciting. There really isn't much revolutionary/big they could do, tough, apart from VR as part of the package.
noja 7y ago
8k support is so Sony can sell more TVs.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 7y ago
The 8K support definitely seems bizarre considering 4K seems barely supported properly in even most PS4 games. Or if it is supported, you have to play the game in 30fps instead of 60fps @1080. 4K gaming on PC, even with decent hardware, is still somewhat hard to hit comfortable frame rates.
- pdpi 7y ago
  The PS4 works fine as a 4K Blu-ray player though. Having the hardware to support 8k output means you have that covered when it becomes widespread
  - wmf 7y ago
    PS4 (even the Pro) cannot play 4K Blu-rays. I'll predict that the PS5 won't be powerful enough to handle 8K AV2 video or whatever ends up coming out.
    - javagram 7y ago
      PS4 Pro has the power to play 4k blu rays but doesn’t have the capability due to either the drive or licensing fee. Power isn’t the issue as the Xbox One S is equivalent to a base PS4 and handles 4k discs fine.
- mortenjorck 7y ago
  I doubt we’ll see broad 8K support in triple-A games for some time, but 2D games arguably benefit more from higher resolution, anyway. The Playstation 3, which ran most games at a maximum of 720p (many, like the Grand Theft Auto series, rendered internally at 640 or 512), actually supported 1080p output, something the Pixeljunk series used to great effect. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a sprite or vector-based game on the PS5 that does something similar with 8K.
davrosthedalek 7y ago
Raytracing is a good thing, not so much because of the better graphics, but because it enables produce nice graphics with less sophisticated engines and less artist input. A lot of the lighting etc. is currently baked into textures, hard coded, hand-optimized. This takes a lot of time. With raytracing, a lot of this comes "for free", so smaller / indie dev teams can produce games with AAA level graphics.
- izzydata 7y ago
  At the high cost of performance. As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for. I'd rather see high frame rates than bleeding edge graphics. It's a good technology, but if we can't even manage 60 FPS minimum in 2020 I will be highly disappointed.
  - acct1771 7y ago
    We manage 75+ with ease on PCs larger than toasters.
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    > As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for. I don't see how this could possibly be. Ease of development could mean the difference between your next favorite game existing at all. Or having the funds to become your next favorite game instead of cutting scope into a mediocre game that never got to realize its full creative ambition. All upstream concerns contribute to the end result that you do care about. Anything that helps people create AAA-quality games without needing the coffers of Electronic Arts is good for gamers.
    - ihuman 7y ago
      I don't understand what you are talking about. You don't need AAA-quality graphics or a 2019 AAA-size budget for a game to be great. The boom of indie games has shown that great games can have great gameplay and performance, but without the fancy graphics of an AAA game. Do you have any examples of the complexity of AAA graphics caused a game to either have its scope cut, or not exist at all? The only one remotely close to that is Destiny 1's devtools making created/editing levels difficult. However, that game had more fundamental problems, like needing to support the PS3 in addition to the PS4.
stuart78 7y ago
Both PS4 and Xbox One came out just as 4K was starting to get into market (prob a bit ahead of where 8K will be when PS5 launches), and it was frustrating that we had to wait 4ish years to get 4k support. Committing to 8K early means the same box will serve the early adopters as well as everybody else without a mid-cycle upgrade. I generally think there will be limited urgency to upgrade to 8K any time soon (benefits over 4K seem incremental and we're not close to done w/ that transition yet) in the home, but love that Sony is making a strong stake for technical leadership.
klodolph 7y ago
Regarding 8K... even though 4K TVs are readily available, my guess is most of those TVs don't display 4K content. Netflix will often give you 720p. Game consoles have a difficult time simply pushing 4K pixels down the pipeline. Some games have taken to something akin to interlacing, except with the pixels divided in a checkerboard pattern.
- dugditches 7y ago
  Sony sells TVs. Getting consumers more familiar with the 'next' format helps them down the road. Also bigger is always better, unless it's fractional.
- baddox 7y ago
  Netflix is actually probably the most common source of 4k home video for most people. Nearly all of the Netflix original content is 4k, increasingly in Dolby Vision. Unfortunately (and bizarrely, to me), you do have to buy the most expensive monthly plan to have access to the 4k content. I don't understand why they would choose to make video quality the main object of price discrimination (it seems like associating Netflix with great video quality would be extremely advantageous to them), but hey, it worked for them to get the extra bucks from me.
  - Matticus_Rex 7y ago
    Doesn't 4k content both cost them more to deliver and generally go to a demo that is more price insensitive? Seems like an obvious play.
    - lightgreen 7y ago
      No, most of the money Netflix spends on buying content, servers and network cables are cheap. I've just googled: Netflix yearly revenue is 16B and Netflix spent 12B on content.
      - Matticus_Rex 7y ago
        Well, if I could offer content (some of which was unique) to a self-selected audience that has very low price sensitivity, I would absolutely put it at a higher price point. Seems like a no-brainer.
mstade 7y ago
Seems to me that both 8k and ray tracing capabilities fall into the category of better to be prepared than not, because upgrading consoles beyond the HDD isn't really much of a thing – you just replace the whole thing. Maybe they could do a PS5 Pro thing much like they did with PS4, but why not just include the hardware right off the bat if it's available and fits within the cost parameters? As a very happy PS4 Pro customer, I'm definitely also in the optimistic camp. Heck, I don't even care all that much for the hardware, but I absolutely loved Horizon Zero Dawn and given its a PS exclusive I'll buy the PS5 just because of the next HZD installment.
chrisdfrey 7y ago
I imagine it's easier to sell higher resolution over higher framerates.
trixie_ 7y ago
8k piped into a next gen VR headset would be epic.
vvillena 7y ago
PS5 will support 8K just like PS3 supported 1080p: it was there but almost no one used it. Nearly every game opted for 720p instead. It's a way to future-proof the generation, allowing for a future enhanced version of the console.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  Cautionary tale: the PS4 Pro retroactively dropped support for many early 4K displays, including my own, in a software update. The updates were hardware fused to prevent downgrading, of course. My plan for 8k is to wait for mass market adoption before buying one and hooking it up to a DRM-box built by a company with foreseeable financial interest in "stimulating" display upgrades during a down quarter.
  - veidr 7y ago
    Wow really? That sucks... just curious: what model of TV do you have?
  - dTal 7y ago
    Lest we forget, Sony also sold PS3s with the advertised feature of Linux support, which was later removed in a firmware update. The same Sony which sold audio CDs with rootkits. I miss the idealistic days when hackers held grudges. Don't buy Sony. They are the enemy.
linsomniac 7y ago
8K seems like a good bet, since 6+ years ago when the PS4 came out 4K matched your statements about 8K today. :-)
awill 7y ago
They won't really support native 8k in any real game. They'll support 8k the way ps4 pro support 4k. Through their upscaling technique. I'm all for that. The ps5 should definitely be able to do true, real 4k, and upsample to 8k

abrawill 7y ago

8K output support doesn't really cost much so I wouldn't worry about it. It doesn't matter to most of the GPU internals. Games will internally run at whatever resolution they think results in the best quality/responsiveness/fluidity/development-cost trade-off, supporting 8K doesn't change anything there.

fisherwithac 7y ago
Fair enough. My concerns were more rooted in performance than the cost of the console itself. But the performance gains they reported by switching to an SSD would more than likely trump anything lost by supporting higher resolutions.
- awill 7y ago
  there's nothing 'lost' by supporting higher resolutions. It will render internally at (say) 4k, and upsample to 8k.
- abrawill 7y ago
  Agreed! I'd say the SSD is a real, literal, game changer. Extra resolution is just more of the same really.

jsight 7y ago

I'm assuming that there are basically two reasons to support 8K now. One is that it gets them higher resolution for a potential future VR headset. The other is that it is bigger than 4K and that sounds good in their marketing.

BenMorganIO 7y ago
I suspect it's more for VR and 8k bump on output is cheap compared to helping Samsung and LG sell their 8k models.
fisherwithac 7y ago
Another possible reason, now that I think about it more, is future proofing. If that's the case, then props for forward thinking on their part. Recently on a whim I decided to plug in my N64 to a 1080p TV, and I was surprised how terribly the graphics scaled to the higher resolution.
- seiferteric 7y ago
  My understanding is it's not just the resolution, but CRT vs LCD. N64 looks best on a a CRT.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    The N64 is also mainly hampered by it's texture memory. You only have 4KB total to play with for a texture (it's manually managed memory, not a cache) and with mipmaping, that's effectively 2KB. That's one 32x32 picture at 16bit color. Additionally, developers didn't have a great handle on how the more modern memory hierarchy (read high DRAM latency) affected things yet so a lot of techniques they used sort of fought against the architecture and led to low resolutions, and they used heavy blurring and antialiasing to compensate.
    - klodolph 7y ago
      To add to this, this is why GoldenEye N64 has so many grayscale textures... they use less memory.

the_duke 7y ago

All of the changes are pretty much expected and even mandatory for justifying a new generation, especially with the spec boost we saw mid generation. Nothing disappointing, but also nothing surprising/exciting. There really isn't much revolutionary/big they could do, tough, apart from VR as part of the package.

noja 7y ago

8k support is so Sony can sell more TVs.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 7y ago

The 8K support definitely seems bizarre considering 4K seems barely supported properly in even most PS4 games. Or if it is supported, you have to play the game in 30fps instead of 60fps @1080. 4K gaming on PC, even with decent hardware, is still somewhat hard to hit comfortable frame rates.

pdpi 7y ago
The PS4 works fine as a 4K Blu-ray player though. Having the hardware to support 8k output means you have that covered when it becomes widespread
- wmf 7y ago
  PS4 (even the Pro) cannot play 4K Blu-rays. I'll predict that the PS5 won't be powerful enough to handle 8K AV2 video or whatever ends up coming out.
  - javagram 7y ago
    PS4 Pro has the power to play 4k blu rays but doesn’t have the capability due to either the drive or licensing fee. Power isn’t the issue as the Xbox One S is equivalent to a base PS4 and handles 4k discs fine.
mortenjorck 7y ago
I doubt we’ll see broad 8K support in triple-A games for some time, but 2D games arguably benefit more from higher resolution, anyway. The Playstation 3, which ran most games at a maximum of 720p (many, like the Grand Theft Auto series, rendered internally at 640 or 512), actually supported 1080p output, something the Pixeljunk series used to great effect. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a sprite or vector-based game on the PS5 that does something similar with 8K.

davrosthedalek 7y ago

Raytracing is a good thing, not so much because of the better graphics, but because it enables produce nice graphics with less sophisticated engines and less artist input. A lot of the lighting etc. is currently baked into textures, hard coded, hand-optimized. This takes a lot of time. With raytracing, a lot of this comes "for free", so smaller / indie dev teams can produce games with AAA level graphics.

izzydata 7y ago
At the high cost of performance. As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for. I'd rather see high frame rates than bleeding edge graphics. It's a good technology, but if we can't even manage 60 FPS minimum in 2020 I will be highly disappointed.
- acct1771 7y ago
  We manage 75+ with ease on PCs larger than toasters.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  > As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for. I don't see how this could possibly be. Ease of development could mean the difference between your next favorite game existing at all. Or having the funds to become your next favorite game instead of cutting scope into a mediocre game that never got to realize its full creative ambition. All upstream concerns contribute to the end result that you do care about. Anything that helps people create AAA-quality games without needing the coffers of Electronic Arts is good for gamers.
  - ihuman 7y ago
    I don't understand what you are talking about. You don't need AAA-quality graphics or a 2019 AAA-size budget for a game to be great. The boom of indie games has shown that great games can have great gameplay and performance, but without the fancy graphics of an AAA game. Do you have any examples of the complexity of AAA graphics caused a game to either have its scope cut, or not exist at all? The only one remotely close to that is Destiny 1's devtools making created/editing levels difficult. However, that game had more fundamental problems, like needing to support the PS3 in addition to the PS4.

stuart78 7y ago

Both PS4 and Xbox One came out just as 4K was starting to get into market (prob a bit ahead of where 8K will be when PS5 launches), and it was frustrating that we had to wait 4ish years to get 4k support. Committing to 8K early means the same box will serve the early adopters as well as everybody else without a mid-cycle upgrade. I generally think there will be limited urgency to upgrade to 8K any time soon (benefits over 4K seem incremental and we're not close to done w/ that transition yet) in the home, but love that Sony is making a strong stake for technical leadership.

klodolph 7y ago

Regarding 8K... even though 4K TVs are readily available, my guess is most of those TVs don't display 4K content. Netflix will often give you 720p. Game consoles have a difficult time simply pushing 4K pixels down the pipeline. Some games have taken to something akin to interlacing, except with the pixels divided in a checkerboard pattern.

dugditches 7y ago
Sony sells TVs. Getting consumers more familiar with the 'next' format helps them down the road. Also bigger is always better, unless it's fractional.
baddox 7y ago
Netflix is actually probably the most common source of 4k home video for most people. Nearly all of the Netflix original content is 4k, increasingly in Dolby Vision. Unfortunately (and bizarrely, to me), you do have to buy the most expensive monthly plan to have access to the 4k content. I don't understand why they would choose to make video quality the main object of price discrimination (it seems like associating Netflix with great video quality would be extremely advantageous to them), but hey, it worked for them to get the extra bucks from me.
- Matticus_Rex 7y ago
  Doesn't 4k content both cost them more to deliver and generally go to a demo that is more price insensitive? Seems like an obvious play.
  - lightgreen 7y ago
    No, most of the money Netflix spends on buying content, servers and network cables are cheap. I've just googled: Netflix yearly revenue is 16B and Netflix spent 12B on content.
    - Matticus_Rex 7y ago
      Well, if I could offer content (some of which was unique) to a self-selected audience that has very low price sensitivity, I would absolutely put it at a higher price point. Seems like a no-brainer.

mstade 7y ago

Seems to me that both 8k and ray tracing capabilities fall into the category of better to be prepared than not, because upgrading consoles beyond the HDD isn't really much of a thing – you just replace the whole thing. Maybe they could do a PS5 Pro thing much like they did with PS4, but why not just include the hardware right off the bat if it's available and fits within the cost parameters? As a very happy PS4 Pro customer, I'm definitely also in the optimistic camp. Heck, I don't even care all that much for the hardware, but I absolutely loved Horizon Zero Dawn and given its a PS exclusive I'll buy the PS5 just because of the next HZD installment.

chrisdfrey 7y ago

I imagine it's easier to sell higher resolution over higher framerates.

trixie_ 7y ago

8k piped into a next gen VR headset would be epic.

vvillena 7y ago

PS5 will support 8K just like PS3 supported 1080p: it was there but almost no one used it. Nearly every game opted for 720p instead. It's a way to future-proof the generation, allowing for a future enhanced version of the console.

jjoonathan 7y ago
Cautionary tale: the PS4 Pro retroactively dropped support for many early 4K displays, including my own, in a software update. The updates were hardware fused to prevent downgrading, of course. My plan for 8k is to wait for mass market adoption before buying one and hooking it up to a DRM-box built by a company with foreseeable financial interest in "stimulating" display upgrades during a down quarter.
- veidr 7y ago
  Wow really? That sucks... just curious: what model of TV do you have?
- dTal 7y ago
  Lest we forget, Sony also sold PS3s with the advertised feature of Linux support, which was later removed in a firmware update. The same Sony which sold audio CDs with rootkits. I miss the idealistic days when hackers held grudges. Don't buy Sony. They are the enemy.

linsomniac 7y ago

8K seems like a good bet, since 6+ years ago when the PS4 came out 4K matched your statements about 8K today. :-)

awill 7y ago

They won't really support native 8k in any real game. They'll support 8k the way ps4 pro support 4k. Through their upscaling technique. I'm all for that. The ps5 should definitely be able to do true, real 4k, and upsample to 8k