First of all let me say I'm very excited about the coming consoles and will buy me a ps5 day 1.
But looking at the specs of the new consoles and I can't be the only one who thinks this.
The only components which are true generational leaps are the CPU power and the storage speed.
Ram we are going from 8gb to 16gb.... that's only a 2x jump. The jump from ps3 to PS4 was 16x.
Gpu performance we are going from 1.8tf to 10.2tf.... that's a ~5x jump. The jump from ps3 to PS4 was 8x.
The jump in storage space is even smaller. We are not even getting a 2x jump from the last gen and the games are certainly not getting smaller.
I am no expert but I play video games since the 80's and from the rough numbers we are seemingly getting the smallest jump ever. It is even smaller when we factor in the pro versions of the systems.
What is the reason for this? Was the same jump not possible from a technical standpoint or do I have a failure in my thought process? Why just a 2 times jump in memory when we were getting normally 10-20 times of a jump for example....
You are looking at the specs all wrong.
First of all the SSD bandwidth, not the size that matters. You are getting a 100x boost here. Not just in the SSD speed, but also in I/O which should make all the specs around it better. More efficient GPU, more efficient CPU, more efficient RAM utilization. It improves everything. For example, the graphics jump between the ps2 to ps3 was roughly 35x, here we are getting a 100x jump in storage speed which as we saw in the UE5 demo is going to completely change the way games are designed.
The GPU is only a 5x jump, but thats just the PS5. Xbox Is an 8x jump compared to the xbox one just like the PS4 was to the PS3 which at the time had the worst gpu. so it's kinda disingenuous to choose the ps5 as example here.
The GPU also has ray tracing built in which does not help with tflops numbers, but trust me having dedicated hardware for ray tracing was considered almost impossible just last year. It's a big big deal. MS mentioned how if they had to do ray tracing using traditional GPUs, it would require 25 tflops. So if you think about it, this 12 tflops gpu is around 25 tflops of raw graphical power and Sony's would be over 20.
Lastly, the vram doesnt need that big of an improvement because of the ssd and i/o. Cerny mentioned how they can easily load in 6gb of data in a second into vram. before devs had to store the next 30 second of data in vram, they dont have to do that anymore. that will help manage vram space much better.
Add all of this to the CPU power (8x... last gen CPUs were basically the same as current gen CPUs with worse architectures) and raw SSD speed you mentioned and we are going to be seeing a massive jump in quality. Hell we have already seen it.
This is going to be the biggest leap in gaming since the PS1 to PS2 era.
