How many years will the PS4/XB1 be able to last this generation of gaming?

Probably another 5-6 years

Probably five to six years.

PC hardware is starting to run a quicker and quicker pace in terms of advancements. This makes the consoles seem quite underpowered in comparison. In a couple of years we will see tablets and phones with more power at a comparable price point. Console makers are going to have to find some kind of way to tackle this issue. My vote for this generation is 4 more years.

@GoldenElementXL:

Tablets seem to be gearing towards a more budget design. You can only do so much with a phone--it will reach a point where $500 doesn't give much more than the last one. Phone prices will come down.

Well considering how damn slow it's going, and we haven't even seen what they can really do yet, i'd be shocked if it was less than 6 years.

Stop spreading this bs, phone's haven't even caught up with last gen consoles.

Simple.

Whenever Sony can make another box that is around 10x more powerful than the PS4, consumes 150 watts and has a manufacturing price of around $399.99.

So, 5-6 yrs should be plenty time.

They said they want consoles to last longer than previous ones. Expect ten years of life cycle.

The Samsung Note 4 has a 2.6 GHz quad core CPU, 3 GB of RAM and a 1440p screen. The 360 had a 3.2 GHz tricore and 512 GB of RAM. And the iPhone 6 Plus benchmarks well with GPU intensive applications. The thing is there are new phones every year. And while phones and tablets advance annually, these consoles will stay the same.

but when the PS3 came out it had Blu-ray (most pc's didn't have it yet) it also had a super computer cell processor (most pc didn't have that processing power)

the ps4 was already worse than decent midrange pc's from last gen this is way different isn't it ?

You cannot compare numbers like this between mobile and console/desktop. Vita has more RAM than a 360, doesn't make it even half as powerful. Mobile RAM is a lesser memory as well.

You'd have to show me benchmarks of that CPU, but just because it's a quad core doesn't mean much. I know that the quad core in Vita does not match the Xenon in 360.

I don't even have to look at the gpu to know it's not on par, mobile gpu's just aren't there yet. Perhap's the next mobile gpu from Nvidia (the tegra X1) will close the gap more or less, but we don't have benchmarks yet and the chips in actual devices won't be using the full power to keep heat low and to not drain the battery so fast. Nvidia has fudged numbers for years with their mobile gpu's so I will remain skeptical.

Mobile is very away from your statement. We will see mobile CPU's beat the ps4/xb1 at some point this gen (perhaps in a couple years because they are basically jazzed up tablet chips already), but gpu's won't come close.

If Project Morpheous is a success it could last 7-10 years for ps4. If not 4-5 years. I just hope for a bigger hardware jump.

It will be short lived. The hardware specs were terrible right out of the gate. Things are moving quick these days. More attention to PC and mobile.

@Chozofication: Yeah I guess I can agree with that. I think we are between the "phones and tablets will have more power" claim and your "stop spreading this BS, phones haven't caught last gen" claim. Both Nvidia and AMD are pushing low TDP and mobile products. There is a lot more money in the mobile market to be won then there is in others. Now maybe I am jumping the gun on this tech reaching consumer level products during this video game console generation. But it's out there. And the PS4 and Xbox One are pretty much using tablet CPU's as it is. Your GPU statement is accurate though. Phones and tablets can't really compete with such low power consumption. Yet. But all we can do is wait and see.

Yes it is.

i want it to last no more than 4y but with the sales the ps4's getting... it'll be at least 6.

10 years.

I've voted 5 but a 10 year gen again wouldn't surprise me. They are going to seem hellishly underpowered even after 5.

they are already outdated

I'm voting 3 years from now. So 4 years I guess. They can want all they want. My toaster will be more powerful than these consoles in 5 years.
If they take longer than 5 years I predict that there will either be no successor, or the successor will be the last.

Comparison is totally null for more than 1 reason,comparing CPU is useless without a benchmark more when is from 2 different vendors those 2.6 quad core are not even close to a desktop CPU in performance they have the speed but totally lack the power.

Most games i have seen in phones which claim to beat last gen consoles are a joke and don't really do it.

Bioshock running on an Iphone 6.

Bioshock on xbox 360..

You can clearly see how the Iphone 6 version fail miserably to match the 360 version,and this is an Iphone 6 i have been hearing claims about phones matching consoles for 2 or 3 years now,which is totally untruth..

I think i 5 or 6 years depending how successful the PS4 is or the one.

Forever since this is the last we'll see of consoles as we know them.

I think you need to take a course in remedial English.

9-10 years just like last gen. Unless there is some kind of crash or one company pulls the plug on their system early.

5 more years.

No way does this gen last 10 yrs, esp if Nintendo launches a console sooner (which they will probably have to). My guess is the XB1 lasts 4 more years before MS pulls the plug. PS4 has some longer legs in it but might be like this gen where Sony jumps at same time?

10 years...with 5 or 6 of those being really strong with support / game releases

5 years is my guess, then PS5 is a GO, locked and mother fucking loaded. Day fucking 1..awwww yeahhh

At least another 5 years I think.

Ya not really anything on there I want to click. I'd say anywhere from 4-6, but even then I don't see them staying all that relevant with the way the mobile market is shifting to more powerful machines that essentially replace laptops. Right now you can buy a razor tablet for $1500 that performs as good as and better (high/medium 30-60fps) in same ways as an xbox one and it houses the ability to play every windows game ever released. By the end of 2015 gaming/high performance tablets will be available that will outperform the ps4, be more portable, and more convenient, with far more user controls and options without the added online fee's or closed of marketplaces with high almost never changing prices. Oh and it will stream to any smart tv or windows device in your home if it contains an Nvidia card.

I kind of understand why they went with such underpowered machines though. During the design faze they would have been going through the global recession, Sony was hit hard and wasn't doing well, and Microsoft was under pressure from the stock owners to stop losing money on machines, or cut out all together of the console market. Sony put all their eggs in a cheap to produce machine that 4 years ago would have been a beast. And Microsoft... Well you can see from their horrible pitch of their original idea how much the stock owners were pushing for some kind of change, because boy was that a hell of a lot of change with absolutely zero benefit to the consumer.

Both turned out to be way behind, not only in terms of power, but even in their attempts to update and refresh their takes on their online stores and UI. There is now Built in social media tie ins that, 99% of people don't need or want and are now hard-coded into the system. My Sony phone had this done to it as well, and I won't be buying another Sony phone till the crap/bloatware/spyware is not hard coded into the OS, and irremovable. But back to the consoles. Their online stores are a joke, when compared to the competitive markets shown on the pc, and they even have the balls to force payment to have any access to online features of the machine. That 5-10$ payment Sony wanted for online play really pissed me off as a long time Sony customer. They in no way shape or form showed why they needed the extra cash as I didn't see any mention of dedicated servers for the whole of the ps4 games library. So I said pass.

Glad I did, as I have a great pc now that I'm more then happy using, and for the price I can do so much more and with a lot more control on the system and the amount being shelled out in dollars. I really see the mobile market and windows 10 with directx12 putting a major kink in the above 5-10 year plan these companies seem to be forecasting. Will have to wait and see though, only time will tell and it's going to get really interesting over the next 5 years, as games like squadron 42, start pushing what is actually possible when not held back by the specs of a machine that more resembles powerful tablets then pc's.

As long as there are no alternatives for console gamers, they can stretch it out as long as last gen. I think the companies want to because it takes a while of profiting to cut into the red.

6 if we're lucky.

There are always alternatives.

@KungfuKitten:

Average gamer you meet in Gamestop or Target isn't even considering PC and others. The mass consumer buys consoles.

5 years

Nintendo will probably release a new console first, around 2018. MS and Sony will release new consoles soon thereafter, maybe as late as 2020. Those 2 consoles will be able to play new games of the era at med-high settings in 4K. The new Ninty console will not target Ultra HD resolutions for AAA games. Nintendo flagship titles will target 1080p 60fps, while only remakes and media will display in 4K.

There is a good chance we will see a new console contender enter the fray from Samsung or another large tech company, if Steam Machines achieve moderate success.

@Guy_Brohski: All ready pc manufacturers like asus are building console sized pc's with a dedicated UI like a console when a controller is plugged in, and runs windows when a mouse and keyboard are in use. They cost just a tad more and are more powerful then both the new consoles so companies are all ready breaking into that market, and with only low end pc hardware that all ready outperforms the two box's.

I just can't see them lasting as long as the PS3/360. 5 years at the most is a safe bet.

PS3 and 360 actually felt like they were pushing console gaming way ahead when they were revealed, whereas PS4 and XB1 felt outdated upon announcement.

8 YEARS

I personally think this gen will last 7 years.

You can already achieve 10x more power than the PS4 on PC and the gap will continue to widen.

Yes I know achieving this 10x more power requires a substantially higher wattage power supply but it just goes to show you how far consoles are behind compared to last gen.

My current PC is more than 6x the power of the PS4.

The best card is 3x Ps4.

Cpu wise PC probably has a 6x advantage, maybe even 10x i'm not sure really.

But sli is not worth it and is just a fire hazard.

If we're going to compare ridiculous quad SLI (which does not scale 1:1 or even work with all games) dual cpu rigs we might as well compare server farms to consoles.

Nah the Nvidia Titan from 2013 was around 3x the power of the PS4.

The 780ti was around 10-15% better than the Titan and the GTX 980 is around 10-15% better than the 780ti.

Then take into account that these cards can perform around 15-20% better when overclocked.

A well overclocked GTX 980 probably performs about 5x better than a PS4. Now add two of them and you should get near 10x the perform since SLI scales very well these days (around 90% sometimes close to 100%) in most games, especially the Nvidia 9xx series of video cards.

You can also SLI 3 cards together which is probably where I would draw the line as 4 cards don't really show as much of an improvement compared to 2 and 3 card setups.

By next year the gap will probably increase by another 50% since there are some big changes coming in from Nvidia and AMD which will improve performance by quite a bit.

I myself have two GTX 970s in SLI and they are no fire hazard. They run cool and don't use much wattage to power.

One GTX 970 performs stock vs stock within 5% of the 780ti and when overclocked it can perform like a stock GTX 980 or slightly better.

Also for CPUs the consoles use weak tablet CPUs that can be beaten by an old 2006 overclocked intel quad core cpu. Even the weak Phenom II x4 cpus are better.

Intel released cheaper 8 core/16 thread versions of their extreme versions of CPUs last year which should easily perform 10x better than what the PS4 has CPU wise.

GTX 980 - 4.616 T flops

Ps4 - 1.84 T flops

I was wrong it's not even 3x, it's 2.5x. I understand you can't compare different architectures 1:1 but the difference won't be that much. Only with a high overclock would it be 3x. Plus there's the improvements made to the ps4's gpu so it will be better at compute than the 7850, it should be as good or better than 7970 in that way.

GPU wise the consoles will be fine this generation (though Xbone is stuck with 900p sometimes), they'll be dinosaurs because of the cpu's in a few years.

You cannot compare flop count as a way to measure performance because architecture differences are more important.

The 290x has 5632 flop count while the GTX 980 has 4616.

Going by that the 290x should be easily more powerfil than the 980 yet the 980 easily beats it.

AMD and Nvidia architecture is very different.

Hell even comparing two Nvidia cards from different generations may not be accurate when going by flop count.

The 980 has 4616 flops while the 780ti has 5046 yet the 980 performs around 10-15% better despite have around 10% of a flop count.

The 970 has almost 30% of a flops count compared to the 780ti yet performs within 0-5% of it and sometimes will surpass it on rare occasions.

"You can already achieve 10x more power than the PS4 on PC and the gap will continue to widen."

No you can't.

"Yes I know achieving this 10x more power requires a substantially higher wattage power supply but it just goes to show you how far consoles are behind compared to last gen."

Yeah, because PC cases can be way bigger than a console, allowing it to have adequate room to cool such a card.

"My current PC is more than 6x the power of the PS4."

So you have an 11 Teraflop GPU? Your SLI 980 setup only produces 6 Teraflops. That is only a little over 3x the performance.

Please go learn more about computers before you make a post because you obviously don't know what you are talking about.

It'll be over when Sony says it is.

True. Well then we should compare an overclocked 7850 (since Ps4 is better than 7850 but worse than 7870) to a 980 to try and quantify the difference. No way in hell it's even 4x though.

970 is gimped you know..

Also I can see this performance difference in games as well.

For example in Sniper Elite 3 the PS4 the game runs at 1080p with lower settings than PC max, especially the tessellation being scaled back, yet the PS4 gets around 40-60fps with some drops in the 30s.

On my PC I can max the game out at 1440p along with 4xSSAA which essentially quadruples the resolution making it almost 8x higher than the PS4 and yet I get around 50-75fps.

So even at almost 8x the resolution with higher settings I was still pulling higher frame rates compared to the PS4.