What should next gen consoles have under hood?

I mean theoretically what specs should console have in order not to be power hogs and somehow at the same time a lot more future-proof than their current iterations?

They should have at least 8GB of dedicated VRAM, 4GB of dedicated OS RAM and another 8GB of RAM for games. Processor - I'm not sure. HDD should be around 3TB at least.

I'm not even sure if it's doable.

I don't get why people like you do this. It's barely over a year into this gen.

basically console hardware is now irrelevant.... its all about the games now...

we reached a point where PC is untouchable.

Games. Specs are trash without the games that push them.

Consoles dont look at PCs when jumping generations. They look at manufacturing costs + price points.

Funny enough, its PC gaming who holds back until consoles do their own thing, before raising the system requirement ceiling and ground.

holograms.

People are disappointed in the ps4/xb1 power wise.

They'll last a good bit though, we've only seen a small fraction of what they can do.

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RAM is the one thing you can count on them having a lot of, at least 64gb's it's just the progression of things.

CPU won't even matter that much in what they go with, but we'll see a huge leap there since jaguar's so weak, relatively. GPU, that depends on what manufacturing process we get to, Moore's law is slowing down.

I'm pretty happy with the PS4's power. I just wish it had a larger HDD, something I could do myself if I cared to do so. The system should have come with at least 1TB though. I've already had to delete some things, which seems odd.

who cares at this point?

What should be under their hoods?

Hopefully hardware...

assuming a 2019 launch (i dont think this gen will go on as long as the last).

itll be a unified memory architecture anyway. none of this split memory stuff like a PC or PS3. just one pool of memory. proabbly the fastest GDDR available at the time.

Ram: around 32GB ram available for games (thats a linear advancement: 512MB to 4GB to 32GB...8X. it can vary a bit going further back but ram usually jumps by around 8 to 10X.). it could be more than 32GB in total but 32GB available for games.

CPUs: probably a similar amount of cores and speed but with a much more efficent design. so better bang per clock basically. proabbly X86 based also to aid backwards compatability and they are already invested in it.

GPU: the equivalent of 3-4 of the best chips today combined in terms of horsepower (2019 release remember...they wont be so good in 2019). the balance of power will be lopsided towards the GPU again (proabbly more so than this gen even) but thats the correct way to do it now. this gen one of the big transitions will be moving more work to the GPU (things like physics, certain elements of AI and so on).

although SSDs continue to fall in price i dont know if they will be low enough for consoles by 2019. its one area where a manufacturer will want to save a few bucks. expect a 1TB HDD drive minimum though.

for nintendos console.

powered by fluffy kittens with a GPU made of pure joy. the CPU will be 3D happiness and games will come on a brand new storage medium nicknamed joy puke :P. there will be....no ram. just bliss :D.

seriosuly though i think nintendos next console is going to be based a lot more on very beefed up mobile tech. it could be ARM cores backed by a more desktop like GPU (working with nvidia would make a lot of sense on this) but they may also decide to use a mobile GPU has their base and build on that. Imagination technologies have experience in building both desktop GPUs (though that was short lived) and mobile gpus (where they are very successful) so that could also be of interest to them.

always hard to call with nintendo. i dont see them going with an IBM CPU again as its making porting between their handheld and console more difficult than it should be and the wiiu CPU is not suitable for a handheld at all. i dont know about AMD.....i dont think they have anything suitable for, what i think, are nintendos requirements next gen. they may have something in the oven though so i wouldnt rule them out either.

Hopefully prototype kind of hardware like we've seen previous gens. There is nothing to 'master/unlock' on ps4/x1 with mid/low end pc specs.

Hopefully not a potato like this gen

@silversix_: Pretty sure these Consoles have some longevity to them. It's a long read but interesting.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/191007/inside_the_playstation_4_with_mark_.php

They should be PCs.

There I said it.

@funsohng

Shouldn't release unless they go high end or are Nintendo.

None. Ditch the hardware and go streaming services, except for Nintendo. Their specs don't really matter to them. Its become apparent that no matter what they release it will be obsolete in 6 months. Maybe a year. Go streaming and no more worries about obsolete hardware.

I do wonder if XBox will just become a fully fledged streaming service for Windows next gen. Maybe with a small box for sale to stream to if you don't want to use a PC.

The next consoles should have whatever is affordable at the time of its release. It is okay everyone dreaming of the next console having quad Titans but it won't happen. As long as there is an improvement and those improvements allow for more creativity and control of games from the developers that is all that really matters.

One thing that does matter is I won't be buying a £600 console just to have 4K resolution.

???

I don't know but the games need to change, I can't go on with just FPS ruling the market any more.

Can't have that for $400. Next.

Edit: I meant can't have latest GPU.

Something you said quite often.

I assumed tech of it's day = higher end cards. But regardless, you can't make power when you lack the hardware to do it. PCs already are more powerful than PS4 can ever be and the margin will grow until developers start their coding with DX12.

I don't want this theoretical BS. Wake me up when that happens and I might buy PS4.

PS5:

50GB RAM

5TB SSD

50 core AMD chip at 50.5GHz and 500MB L2 cache.

$500

My console of the future would have a CPU with 5 billion transistors. Run on DX12 and be connected at all times to The Cloud. I would also include monthly updates to transform this beast as time goes on.

Looks like the future is now..........

Next gen there will be One universal set top box you get for next to nothing made by multiple manufacturers and will function like a streaming Games cable box where you tune in to stations you pay a monthly subscription fee for like EA, Activision, MS, Nintendo, Sony etc. all the powah will be server side / cloud.

So enjoy SW now because next gen, it's all over. :P

@Salt_The_Fries: seeing how it is now and we're closing in on singularity on games, it should at least be 16 GB RAM and 4 to the OS, that would mean almost 3 times the power and that's more than enough

As long as each gen hardware is more powerful than the previous, I'm generally ok with it. There are exceptions to this such as WiiU.

I don't think you even know what you're trying to say here. You should probably just stick to playing games and stop trying to act like an engineer when the reality is the you don't know the first thing about what you're talking about.

Sony and MS don't want nothing to do with the hardware game next gen. And they would be right. Hardware is only holding them back. Look at TW3. It has already beyond maxed out what the systems can do. And we're stuck with this for the next 7 years? No. They better be going streaming next gen.

A CWPH60FPSTT chip.

Co-processor "Can We Please Have 60 FPS This Time" will help in delivering a close* experience to this standard consolites can only dream of now.

*not guaranteed

You have "PSfan" in your freaking username...talk about an obsession.

Calm down dude, it's not my fault you are both jealous and uneducated about your own hobby. What I said still stands though, you don't know what you are talking about. "PS4 exposes the hardware..." what does that even mean? You can't even tell me, can you?

Tech that will finally allow consoles to run all games at 1920x1080 at 60FPS....15 years later.....

lol, Lems really want this gen over.

Wait, so you claim he doesn't know what he's talking about...and then go on to ask him "what does that mean"? LMFAO...classic. You shouldn't be trying to insult anyone's intelligence bud cause you clearly fail in your attempt to do so.

Don't go about telling someone they don't know what they are talking about and then ask them what they meant...you are doing it backwards. If YOU don't know what he meant you should have asked him first for clarification and then he would have cleared up YOUR confusion.

He may or may not know what he's talking about, but one thing is for certain, you sure as hell don't know, so you shouldn't be talking shit.

With the exception of Ninty I think we'll be looking at streaming solutions. PS4/XO might be the end.

@kinectthedots: That was a long post about nothing. Do you even know what the discussion was about?

lol, how about you tell me what scott doesn't know since you claim he didn't know what he was saying...then you asked him what he was talking about lol.

Don't ask me for help buddy, it's you who is lost that right when you claimed the person you quoted didn't know what he was talking about. I perfectly understood what he was trying to say, thou he could have used better wording. It was you who tried to insult him in a aggressive manner when you didn't even understand the basic gist of what he was trying to say.

How about you take off that nasty wanna be superior attitude and ask him in a polite way what he meant by his comment? He may respond to you, or he may not, but if you are going to claim someone doesn't know what they are talking about, YOU'D better have a proper understanding of what they were trying to say, be able to summarize that idea back to them, and give the correct or factual information relating to the point they tried to make.

@kinectthedots: Let me guess...you're mad because you're a console gamer. Right? It's cool, let the inferiority and rage flow through you.

Won't happen, not yet. Perhaps Ps6.

People didn't even want an always online console, you think we'll see streaming only next gen?

Besides that this would suck, it's just not technologically feasible yet to make it the only option for Sony and MS.

Not only is internet still slow, and we still have data caps, but they would still have to have POWERFUL hardware that the streaming data is coming from, and that won't be cheap.

We'll still get one more generation of traditional consoles, and next time they might have BC, the issue there is how much money they want to grub :p

@Chozofication:

It will be publishers who make the push.Sony and MS too.

I remember when paying for online play was unacceptable but throw in some "free" games and nobody blinked. Hardware BC is gone. Azure and psnow are just warm up.

lol, your reply was...as expected. Not much going on up there so I'll take this as your way of how you wish to end the conversation since you stuck your foot in your own mouth and don't know how to recover.

Lastly, if I am "mad" being a console gamer when they receive the most anticipated, most talked about, most highly rated and most awarded games of each generation, i'd probably kill my gaming habit all together if I was a PC gamer so If I was mad it wouldn't be because I am a console gamer.

Games/systems are for enjoyment. I wouldn't bother if they me mad I'd just find another hobby, but that's me...good day sir.

@kinectthedots: u mad bro?