The next PlayStation 5 will deliver more performance, higher resolution, and better graphics logically. But will the Sony PS5 console also offer an 8K resolution? From a marketing point of view, that wouldn’t be bad, but players want something else.
PlayStation 5 Specifications
With the announcement of the “Netflix for Gaming”, Google has also fueled the rumor about Sony’s PlayStation 5. The main focus of the Stadia gaming streaming platform is AMD’s new “Custom GPU”, which with 10.7 teraflops offers significantly higher performance than the current PlayStation 4 Pro (4.2 TFLOPS) and Xbox One X (6.0 TFLOPS) gaming consoles. If you focus on the latest PS5 speculations, you’ll often hear about an AMD Navi graphics unit aiming for 15 teraflops performance.
With its hardware equipment, Stadia promises to stream games in 4K resolution including 60 frames per second (FPS) HDR over the Internet to home TVs, smartphones, laptops and tablets before the end of this year. At the same time, Google announces its goal for the coming years. The company also plans to deliver 8K resolutions with more than 120 FPS in the future. These are ambitious goals which the PlayStation 5 community will be grinning at.
With 15 teraflops, it’s hard to think about 8K
Assuming Sony’s PS5 celebrates its debut in two years and is released with 15 teraflops, an 8K resolution of 7680 x 4320 pixels is conceivable. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card, which is particularly powerful today, offers 14.2 TFLOPs and would, therefore, come close to the performance of a PlayStation 5. But if you look at the current benchmarks, which were carried out with a 4K resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels, you will be disappointed on the spot.
Games like Assassin’s Creed Origins, Far Cry 5, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or Rise of the Tomb Raider work perfectly with the latest RTX 2080 Ti but are a little above the 60 FPS limit. In action-packed scenes, performance is usually lower than that, and that in 4K. With today’s technology, Sony’s PS5 would need the power of two or even four RTX 2080 Ti chips to even think of smooth 8K playback at 60 medium stable FPS. On paper would be 28.4 to 56.8 teraflops, which currently seems almost unattainable for a console, especially in terms of cooling in a compact box with a pleasant fan volume.
PS5 Console players don’t need 8K
The topic 8K on the PlayStation 5 is also worth discussing in many forums. Especially since the affordable 8K TVs are still in the distant future and normal TV content hasn’t even really arrived in the 4K era – with the exception of Netflix & Co. In addition, players would prefer to see one more move towards photorealism and higher quality graphics, as can be seen on many game desks. The still-prevailing gap between the PC and console graphics is about to disappear and the high FPS numbers for TVs and monitors with over 120 Hertz are on some wish lists.
However, many console enthusiasts currently waiting for the PS5. If the PlayStation 5 is marketed with an 8K resolution and then delivers only 30 frames per second, this will probably be great for many players. Maybe, in the end, it is not the number of pure teraflops that counts, but also how the graphics and effects are calculated.