Ah, the tale as old as time. While the plebs salivate over their upcoming SSD technology, us here at the top look down on them from our tempered glass side windows and guffaw heartily. "Look at them down there" we say. "They're finally getting technology we've had for years, again. Oh how excited the peasants are to once again try to play catch up to the master race."
But as we sip our Mountain Dew while the cool RGB fan breeze gently caresses our RTX cards that we traded the kid's college fund for, we don't notice the writing on the walls. In this war, we have always been much fewer but have had far superior weapons. And as we still anticipate more refined tools for our battlestations, they are inching ever closer while we are running out of headspace. The limits of what can be pushed out of silicon are being reached. No longer can we rely on Moore's Law to keep us ahead of the curve of the normies. Scarlett and the PS5 are boasting some fantastic specifications. In fact, they seem to actually be catching up to PC gaming. A solid 60 FPS! 4k resolution! (And 8k, apparently, because sure). Ridiculously low loading times by utilizing what is essentially an Intel Optane drive-esque technique.
Typically in a console cycle, by the time that a new generation rears its head, it does make use of reasonably current hardware and the tradeoff is losing upgradability until the next cycle comes around. Relatively few exceptions exist, such as the "pro" editions of the PS4 and XB1 bringing in a bit more horsepower, but the improvements certainly didn't warrant an immediate upgrade for the cost-centric person such as myself.
And my own attempts at upgrading the PS4 GPU were, at best, underwhelming.
So what makes this cycle that much different? In terms of the gap that will be bridged, quite a lot, actually. The PS4 and XB1 were released in November 2014, which will be six years between launches. I've talked at length about the hardware changes, but what's more important is that after this wave, the need to further upgrade consoles has a pretty low chance of seeing fruition. Perhaps even more so than the six year gap of last time. Let's put aside the banners of war and take a hard look at the real differences between our two sides to hopefully discover that we're all the same on the inside.
In plain terms: PC has the bleeding edge of powerful tech, while console is affordable and games are (usually) optimized for it. PC is where the hobbyist lives, looking for the best parts to run the best settings because, let's face it, it's cool as shit. The console player has their one box on the shelf that you just stick the game in and it just works. Different strokes for different folks, of course. I myself much prefer the PC camp, however I cannot say that I don't miss not having to fuck with drivers and settings and other horrible, abominable software and/or hardware obstacles that we have to overcome before we can even get into the game.
You know, not naming names or anything...
Honestly I'm of the opinion that only the most self-righteous, obnoxious type of person truly has a disdain for console gaming. It's affordable and very plug-and-play, and such a low barrier of entry is fantastic for the gaming community as a whole. While Destiny 2 inarguably runs like a dream on the PC, I'd never once trade in the squad I have on PS4 behind just to double my FPS, just as I'd never expect them to sink the amount of money I have into a decent PC. This is where the war hits home the most - some of your friends are on Xbox. Others are on PS4. The rest are on PC. While this problem likely isn't going away anytime soon, having a better experience on console could persuade more of the PC-minded among the friends group to join you and the squad on PS5. Except for the truly elitist, I suppose. But I mean, come on, were those guys really friends worth keeping around anyway?
What sets this cycle apart is that now the question of "Where else is there to go from here in ways that actually matter to the consumer?" With near-instant loading times, eight entire K's of resolution, and more rays than you can trace a stick at, I'm positing that it will be a long time before the technology evolves to the point where we need a new console generation. The hardware difference between the Super Nintendo and the Nintendo 64 was absolutely staggering for the six year gap between them, and it could be argued that the tech gap that is being bridged between, say, the PS3 and 4 is nowhere near as much of a leap forward. The average console consumer certainly has plenty of reasons to consider a hardware upgrade, and I highly doubt that within the next seven years we will see anything as monumental as the leap from 2D to 3D, or from mechanical HDD to SSD.
With ray tracing and levels of resolutions that no one actually needs coming in holiday 2020, we can obtain for (probably) $500 what would cost the PC enthusiast several thousands at the current market. With ray tracing being a fairly new technology, it will undoubtedly go down in price, especially after it integrates into the console space. However, for the foreseeable future most gamers are perfectly fine with 1080p until 4K comes down to reasonable prices. The thing to remember with PC hardware and tech in general is that while halo products like a $1,200+ top-of-the-line RTX 2080ti get all of the attention, the vast, vast majority of consumers go for what's a good value while delivering a good experience. 1080p has been the standard for many many years now, and while 4k will inevitably overtake it as the most commonplace display resolution, 8k is arguably a very long way away from gracing the average Joe's living room, and I'd argue that a resolution upgrade is quite probably the biggest reason for most people to invest in new hardware for playing games on. The new consoles claim to, in some way, support 8k out of the box, which looks like Sony and Microsoft future-proofing their boxes to prevent resolution obsolesces. And that's the point: we're reaching a point where people can have one machine that not only offers a comparable experience to the technologically superior platform that simply just works, where you can start a game up and jump in with your friends without having to reapply thermal paste every so often or fucking with terrible drivers.
Or far, far worse...
And when the gap between what is possible on a home console and a PC gets narrower and doesn't grow as large as it does after the last generation, then what will the future look like? The only thing that is certain is that the numbers of people who self report as "gamers," as much as that term makes me cringe, is constantly growing. When the same awesome experience can be had without the headache or the bankruptcy then everyone wins. Hopefully come holiday 2020 these high powered consoles will bring us all together just a little bit more.
In the meantime...
