Although Sony has confirmed that the PlayStation 5 will not be coming any time soon, mainly because the PS4 Pro is still fresh and at the moment video games are not demanding that much punching power from consoles, some analysts have been doing bold predictions about what the next PlayStation would be like and when can we expect it.
One of these prophets is business analyst Michael Pachter, from Wedbush Securities, who didn’t stay conservative with his predictions. At Gamingbolt, Pachter forecasted the future of PlayStation consoles, stating that he expects the arrival of PlayStation 5 by 2019 or 2020. He also estimated that the PS5 system will be backward compatible with old PlayStation titles –and it’s got to be that way because the Xbox One X is backward compatible.
The existing PS4 Pro can just barely handle some native 4K gaming
Regarding its 4K capabilities, Patcher commented that Sony will wait for a market that is much more open to 4K content than it currently is. But he also added that the PS5 might be achieving 240fps when it comes out, a very crazy prediction in our opinion, since right now only the toughest GPUs are hitting the 4K@60fps mark or just barely breaking it, and 2020 is not that far away. However plausible this all sounds, Patcher’s specific words are worth a read:
“My expectation that is that it’s not coming out in 2018. That is a 2019 0r 2020 but probably 2019. Sony is probably timing it better because they are going to bring out a 4K capable device when the 4K TV market reaches 50% in the USA and 35% in the rest of the world. I think Sony has probably got the next console cycle nailed down already. I think, they already know what they got to do”.
Sony has not yet confirmed the development of a new console, nor given any details about when it could debut a hypothetical PlayStation 5. Apparently, the company will continue to focus its efforts on the only partially 4K-friendly PlayStation 4 Pro and its upcoming titles. Among these projects are Gran Turismo Sport, Spider-Man, Days Gone, God of War 4, among others.
As far as we’re concerned here at 4K.com, the likelihood of a 4K@240fps PlayStation 5 isn’t that low at all. HDR also stands to reason since it’s rapidly becoming an essential technology of all new TV displays, console and PC games and content sources in 4K. At the very least we could start seeing some sort of gaming hardware that can output these sorts of frame rates for the consumer market, be it console-based or part of a PC GPU package. Between 2014 and now in 2017, top-shelf PC gaming GPUs have emerged with more than twice the frame rate output of what was possible in 2014 On the console side of things, the Xbox One X comes with a GPU core that’s just under 5 times (4.6 times to be exact) more powerful than that of the Xbox One, which originally came out in 2013, only 4 years ago. Extrapolate from this and take into consideration how these advancements also tend to speed up, and a 4K@240fps PS5 console or a new Microsoft device with the same sort of power is well within the bounds of plausibility.
Could we also see a new Xbox with 4K@240FPS for 2019?
Story by 4k.com