The price hikes have all been incremental though. A $10 or $50 price hike is completely different than a $250, $300, or more in the console space. Maybe you’re right and they’ll push the limit by pricing it above $700, but I don’t see it selling well if that’s the case. Will some people get it still? Sure, some purchased the PS3 for $600, but that console also didn’t sell well until they started dropping it to more reasonable prices. If anything, I think making the price of the Pro to the unacceptable (IMO) levels of $750 or more would only push more people to get the standard PS5 unit instead.
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They mean that no CUs will be disabled to improve yields. So if a chip doesn’t have 60 working CUs, it’ll get tossed or used in another device/GPU.
I’m just gonna keep hoping Phil was bluffing and just keeping his cards close to the chest, since Sony hasn’t said a damn thing either. And then we’ll see what happens. If they do nothing until 2027 or even longer, well, I’d hate that. And on top of that the fact Phil said they’d never lose on price and power again. I know some believe he solely meant for a new gen, but I always saw it as overall.
I’m now just gonna look forward to all the great things coming, such as Starfield very soon! And Pro consoles, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
I think their 2 console strategy means it’s harder to have that 3rd Pro console although PS5, while the same system specs wise, does have a digital and non digital version so who knows. But with PS5 Pro and digital PS5 now becoming the norm it’ll still leave them with only 2 systems out.
While it might not be financially possible, I wonder if they could lower the price of Series X by maybe removing the blu-ray drive and make it digital only to match the price of digital PS5, maybe a bit smaller, discount Series S to empty the retail channels, maybe rename the digital Series X it to ‘‘New’’ Series S or something like that during the transition phase, and have the Pro console called the ‘‘New’’ Series X and have it surpass the PS5 Pro while matching it on price.
Sounds easy to me, maybe confusing to some customers, but then again Xbox has always been confusing on messaging anyway so why not keep it going!
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You’d think they’d be working on getting the chip to a 4nm node for both xss and XSX as well. Which I imagine would help as well (even if the wafer costs more)
From my perspective, the only mistake is if the Series S doesn’t hit a mass market price of $199 soon.
There’s been a lot of talk online about the Series S and development for the machine. Much of it is misinformation and none of it factors in the fact that developers and publishers don’t care about any extra work if it makes them money.
Porting to a console like the Switch makes a ton of sense considering its userbase. If the Series S becomes a mass market device like that, developers will want to make sure it runs well on that machine. So all this other rhetoric is fanboy nonsense.
I think the console is in a unique position when a PS5 Pro comes out because if it hits that $199 price by that time and is playing games like Starfield at 1080p, it offers a ton of value and a unique proposition, especially if there’s a Series XL as well.
Having a $199 + $399 + $599 slate of consoles that, at a minimum, support RDNA 2, DX12U, Direct Storage, and Velocity Architecture (not to give that branding any glorification, but rather the fact that it supports SSD speeds) presents an interesting slate for developers especially if all models have their sizable userbases.
Having an XL model makes the expandable SSD solution on the Xbox even more logical.
I’m using voice to text for my messages and it transcribed the Series S as “Series Ass” and I’m genuinely surprised that fanboys haven’t jumped on that and used it. It’s pretty funny.
I have a feeling that PlayStation would shape their next iteration partly around UE5, as it will define this generation. We’ll probably see some hardware optimizations for it and the ability to run UE5 games at 60 and 120 fps. Let’s not forget that Nanite and Lumen are software based solutions to things that RDNA 2 would have done in hardware. While the PS5 Pro could have RDNA 4, I’m sure there’s going to be some HW specialization to assist in these software technologies in UE5.
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If this is true then i am even more confident in xbox mid-gen refresh. Xbox can basically take the X’s chip, overckock it to the maximum with beefier cooling solution and call it a day.
They would only need three changes:
- Higher clock speeds: try to reach north of 2.8Ghz
- Better cooling solution: liquid cooler can easily handle such fast chip
- Memery and memory bandwidth: Series X was handicapped and they just need to layout full bus width of 320bit with 20GB of Vram and call it a day.
The benifit of this would be instant game performance uplift on unpatched titles as well. And xbox won’t have to engineer out the new chip layout. It is just higher clock and memory layout. Also, the chips that won’t yield to higher clocks would simply be used as series X chips.
On the other hand, PS5 pro will require a lot of work because the GPU layout will be changing as well as some IP blocks for things it were missing in PS5.
Is a GPU clock speed of 2.8Ghz realistic though? Looking at specs, even the 7900xtx doesn’t reach those clock speeds and consumes an insane amount of power compared to a console and we’re supposed to believe Sony figured something AMD couldn’t figure out on their own? Unless they’ll be using some next gen AMD stuff we don’t know about yet that can do even more?
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The simple reason that Xbox won’t release a pro console is that they haven’t sold enough hardware to justify it. A pro console would be in the works already for a long time. It’s not something you just magic up.
And given until recently they couldn’t make enough series X consoles they aren’t going to introduce a third SKU into the mix that may well also not sell.
It’s different to last gen where their lack of power was one of the issues and the one X was effectively Phil making a symbolic play rather than a really smart business move. This time there is no such play and releasing one would not be a smart business move.
Xbox can’t afford more and more hardware that isn’t going to sell in big numbers. They probably can’t even justify the production run costs on a higher end machine. It would leave them with three SKUs which is messy to say the least.
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Higher clocks are realistic. What could be questioned though is the cooling solution. I think PS will have to use water cooler this time.
Edit: AMD does not have higher clocks on there cards because of heat and cooling solution. They know it and did not wanted to release a product which is more then $1000 dollars. I believe the PS5 pro clock speed info is inaccurate. Or these higher clocks could be on Dev kits only.
Xbox is positioned very well and just have to wait out PS’s move and then respond.
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It all makes sense for them, true but man, for those hoping they do keep up it’s gonna suck if there’s nothing until next gen. Which is a long time. I really disliked it how at launch XSX was playing catch up with titles like Valhalla and a few others. If this PS5 stuff is true it’s gonna get a lot “uglier”. But nothing to do about it.
Let’s hope so.
I’d actually be surprised if it’s not $799 (depending on the exact specs.) Consoles and PCs keep growing closer together. At that price point they’ll still get the enthusiast console gamers and provide a real alternative for the entry-level PC crowd as well.
There also seems little reason to sell the Pro at a loss, if the base PS5 is still selling above its original RRP in most countries, making a nice little profit.
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Been meaning to reply to this.
So PC gaming really still is hit or miss? I guess you could say that Xbox first party games are pretty good ports for PC but it’s multiplatform titles where it goes wrong more often? Still a lot of tinkering needed to get things right? Not a fan of that. I dig plug and play, the ease of use of consoles.
So if I ever were to get serious about PC gaming I hope to get as little nonsense as possible. So for example take something like AC Mirage, for consoles you can be pretty sure it will be mostly stable, if Valhalla is anything to go by, undoubtedly some frames dropped here and there but noting too horrible. But for PC it’s far from guaranteed? I guess it depends on for how many games that goes, because otherwise I probably could never make the decision to move to PC gaming for most (if not all) new games and keep Xbox for the backlog.
I just clicked Buy on one after never having actually had a gaming PC. I’ll give you my feedback when it gets here haha.
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Which one did you buy? Definitely curious.
Went a little over board lol
You went for the kill. This will cover you up till the 11th gen consoles.
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Holy shiiiiiiiiit!
Congrats man, awesome.
And you only live once, go all out. If possible. 
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