Once you start playing games on PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, you’ll probably hate going back to older consoles. That seems to be the conclusion of a series of reports as well as a big leak that offers clues as to what the new AMD chips combined with faster RAM and solid-state drives will be able to do for gaming. Earlier this week, a trusted insider offered an amazing tale of testing an unnamed game on one of the new consoles. The leaker described the impressive graphics, the increased difficulty of the shooter title, and revealed the game was running at 90fps in native 4K resolution. On top of that, other game developers have started teasing what we can expect from the future of gaming once the new PS5 and Xbox Series X are finally released later this year.
This paragraph alone from the leaker’s description is enough to make you want to play this game:
As I am playing I realize how difficult this game is. I play several games competitively multiple genres (Smite, R6, SFV, CoD, BF, League) but I am getting my ass handed to me. I take the lead character out into a hallway and two enemies rush into the room shooting and moving in what appears to be a tactical pattern. “Is this fucking guy shooting at me while the other guy is trying to circle around to flank me?” he laughs again. “Yep, suppressive fire.” As the enemy shoots at me I take note of the deformation of the geometry on display, chunks of cement give way revealing the metal pipes underneath that hold the structure together. Everything is based in reality including what happens when you shoot people or get shot. Its beautiful but it ain’t pretty.
The more powerful the hardware, the better the special effects you can expect from the game, and not only when it comes to shooters. Talking to GamingBolt, the development team at Wired Productions explained that one of the components powering the new consoles will not only be responsible for reducing load times. The GDDR6 memory of the Xbox Series X will also let developers use more complex effects, and they’ll be able to use them more frequently. They’d be able to deliver better simulations and increase “lifelike fidelity:”
There are some quirks to develop on console having to do with memory management and instantiating content at runtime. Basically, on PC you can create enemies and explosions on the fly, but on console you always have them waiting in the wings, pre-created or pooled for use. That’s the kind of workaround that might not be required anymore in the future, and as a developer that might mean some complex effects are easier achieved and thus more often used. I think like before it might lead to more complex simulations and a general increase in lifelike fidelity with regard to behaviours and content rather than visuals.
One other big improvement coming to future games is support for much higher refresh rates. While the shooter game teased above runs at 90Hz in 4K resolution, some developers are already considering a drastic increase in frame rates for the future. A genre that will definitely benefit from such a move is racing games, where even higher frame rates could further improve the perception of motion. Polyphony Digital’s Kazunori Yamauchi touched on the subject during a discussion with Australian media, via GTPlanet:
Rather than a spatial resolution that you’re talking about, I’m more interested in the advancements we can make in terms of the time resolution. In terms of frames per second, rather than staying at 60 fps, I’m more interested in raising it to 120 fps or even 240 fps. I think that’s what’s going to be changing the experience from here on forward.
That’s the kind of upgrade GT Sport might get for PS5 and Xbox Series X rather than support for 8K resolution, although the latter might also be in the works. However, the exec warned that the performance upgrade between the current and next-gen console won’t be as big as it was between PS1 and PS2. But even so, all these anecdotes tease gaming experiences that make the upgrade to PS5 and Xbox Series X a no-brainer.
