Rumours suggest that AAA studios may soon be working on more powerful development kits, which could herald a change to ‘street’ hardware.

The previous console generation was the first time we saw Sony and Microsoft release a more powerful console, 3-4 years after the original PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Ir gave birth to the PlayStation 4 Pro (which ran games with checkerboard rendering or upscaled from native 1440p resolution to 4K) and the Xbox One X. However, after the release of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series, we wouldn’t have thought history would repeat itself, as a few years ago Albert Penello, formerly one of the heads of Xbox, didn’t see the need to keep up with higher resolution displays:

“It may simply be less necessary as well. 4K was becoming a mainstream resolution for PC and TVs, and the base consoles were designed around driving 1080p (or less) output. When you have a set that requires 4x the performance *just* to drive 4x the pixels, you eat up all the performance just driving resolution. I think it’s unlikely we’ll see 8K TV’s go mainstream like we saw 4K go mainstream – we’re more likely to see improvements in NITS (to drive better HDR) or better framerates to support greater than 60fps on TVs. CPUs and GPUs in the next-gen should easily support higher frame rates and wider colours. So the mid-gen upgrades are not only less financially and technically viable but also likely less necessary to keep up with display technologies,” Penello said.

Earlier this year, we wrote that TCL Technology, a prominent display panel manufacturer, had openly stated that a half-generation upgrade was coming in 2023 or 2024, which at the time, we could rightly think was a market estimate. However, a Rockstar Games leaker (cancelled Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto IV remasters after Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition was poorly received; Kotaku then confirmed it) Tez2 posted on GTA Forums: he says most AAA studios will get the development kits for the half-generation console upgrades either this year or early 2023 and added that it is not speculation on his part. Still, he’s making this claim based on actual information.

Sony and Microsoft will likely use custom GPUs in the more powerful consoles. As AMD plans to unveil the RDNA 3 architecture (5nm process node, advanced chiplet packaging, rearchitected compute unit, optimized graphics pipeline, next-gen AMD Infinity cache, enhanced ray tracing capabilities, refined adaptive power management, >50% Perf/Watt vs RDNA 2), it’s a given that the two companies will build on this, as the current consoles are AMD-based… but of course, it’s not official yet.

Source: WCCFTech