The Next Generation of Gaming: A Revolution in Visuals and Experience

The latest consoles and PCs are laying the groundwork for revolutionary gaming experiences, pushing the boundaries of what we thought was possible in terms of visuals, sound, and immersion. One of the key areas where this is happening is with ray tracing, a technology that allows for more realistic lighting and reflections in games. By using advanced graphics processing units (GPUs) and sophisticated algorithms, developers are able to create scenes that behave like real life, with light bouncing off surfaces and creating a sense of depth and dimensionality that was previously impossible.

The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are two of the most powerful consoles on the market, capable of rendering stunning visuals at speeds that were previously unimaginable. The ability to do ray tracing is just one aspect of this technology, but it's a key part of what sets these consoles apart from their predecessors. By leveraging the power of these new consoles, developers can create games that are not only more visually impressive than anything that came before, but also more immersive and engaging.

Another area where we're seeing significant advancements is in the world-building aspect of gaming. With the power of modern CPUs and GPUs, developers are able to create massive, open worlds that are teeming with life and detail. The SSDs (solid-state drives) on these consoles are helping to reduce load times and enable the creation of even larger worlds. This, combined with the increased processing power, is allowing developers to push the boundaries of what we thought was possible in terms of game design.

But it's not just about the visuals - the sound design is also becoming more advanced. The Tempest Engine on the PlayStation 5 is a great example of this, allowing for a completely immersive audio experience that's unlike anything we've seen before. By combining the power of the console with sophisticated algorithms and techniques, developers are able to create games that feel truly alive.

One thing that's clear from these developments is that the traditional focus on resolution has become less important in recent years. While higher resolutions (such as 4K) were once a major selling point for consoles, they're no longer the primary goal. Instead, we're seeing a shift towards more advanced features like ray tracing and higher-quality pixels.

This is partly due to the fact that most people don't have 8K TVs or monitors, which makes it difficult to notice a difference between lower resolutions. The focus has shifted towards creating a more immersive experience across multiple aspects of gameplay, including visuals, sound, and controller feedback. This is allowing developers to create games that are truly unique and engaging, rather than just chasing after higher resolutions for the sake of it.

The camera industry is another area where we're seeing similar advancements. The iPhone, for example, has a 12-megapixel camera, but a Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra can have hundreds of megapixels. However, when you consider that most people won't be sitting close enough to see the difference between 12 and 100 million pixels, it becomes clear that what really matters is not just raw resolution, but also the quality of those pixels.

Focusing on higher-quality pixels, more realistic lighting effects, and immersive sound design are all key areas where we're seeing significant advancements. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are laying the groundwork for a new generation of gaming experiences that will push the boundaries of what's possible in terms of visuals, sound, and immersion.

As we move forward, it's clear that we won't be seeing the same level of performance increases as we did between generations. Instead, we're entering an era where a few hundred dollars can get you access to decades worth of experience and work put into creating incredible levels of fidelity. This is an exciting time for gaming, and one that promises to deliver truly revolutionary experiences in the years to come.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwe've just gotten our first real look at Xbox series X gameplay and I think the sentiment might be slightly underwhelming so there were certainly some games that were standouts of course we have Assassin's Creed Game of Thrones I mean assassin's creed Valhalla but really the ones that jumped out to me was medium which I think they're a really good job of not really leaning heavily into the very sort of neon baked aesthetic of like some future world but instead something which actually looks really grounded in realism especially with the ray-tracing put on top but this of course brings up a very big question with so many of these games being crossed gen where you buy on Xbox one you get on Series X we shouldn't expect the envelope to be pushed that much but why exactly do so many of these games look very very similar to stuff we could have seen last generation I remember the first time that I saw 3d graphics running on the original PlayStation it was mind-blowing to me to see the realistic looking cars in Gran Turismo or the enormous Lea detailed worlds of final fantasy in a console that I could actually play at home Linux console was the Nintendo GameCube back when Nintendo really were on top of their game from a technical perspective I mean you look at games like smash bros melee or even something like Pokemon Colosseum which I played a ton of and it was a huge step forward and then when I got an Xbox 360 that was almost the biggest leap yet now at the time I actually was still using a CRT but even so when I first put in that Mirror's Edge DVD and got to really experience none of the incredibly clean art style but that incredible just world I was like wow where are we gonna go next but the problem has been that we really haven't gone that far over the last 15 years with the Xbox one and ps4 wall graphics looked better bringing it today there was seven years between the 360 and the Xbox one the actual improvement in graphics wasn't that impressive certainly nowhere near oh we had seen with previous generations of consoles and now that we're going into the Xbox Series X and PS 5 there's a real question here of why don't these games look better why don't we see these massive leaps like we used to going from like ps1 to ps2 well a little bit complicated but I don't think that we're seeing those massive gains anytime soon the game has completely shifted these days so take the original PlayStation one for example this launch with a 33 megahertz processor and three megabytes of RAM which was impressive enough to actually run full 3d games for maybe not the first time there was certainly a huge step forward but may have six years later we got the PlayStation 2 and it was an order of magnitude more powerful we went from a 33 megahertz processor to almost 300 megahertz we went from three megabytes of memory to over 30 megabytes and that was only in six years right I mean it's crazy to think about just how fast advancements really happened in those early days of 3d another six years later and we got the fat boy himself the PlayStation 3 Vista things up to a whole nother level as we went from a single core 300 megahertz processor to a seven core SPU essentially seven 3.2 gigahertz CPU cores and that was backed up by another almost tenfold improvement in memory and when you look at games like The Last of Us toward the end of the PlayStation 3s lifecycle it is clear that this was a quantum leap over the PlayStation 2 not an actual quantum leap that's probably a little bit harder but it was a huge huge improvement so when 2013 rolls around and we get our hands of the PlayStation 4 what we see is a very different so neat in a very different gaming industry as a whole so you see Sony is that company sort of had this weird mentality where they were very focused on this thing called making a profit and that is something that the PlayStation 3 famously did not do for a very long time so the issue with the ps3 was that even though it was wildly expensive out of the gate was like five six hundred bucks but even at that exorbitant price tag Sony were still probably losing money with every single console they sold now ultimately toward the end of the generation they had been able to work out the kinks drop a lot of the features that were in the launch ps3 and they're able to make at least some of their money back but the problem was that while the console was very much ahead of its time making money pretty important so when it came time to bring out the PlayStation 4 it was more conservative in pretty much every single aspect so yes it did have eight times as much memory which is pretty much on par with what we had seen jumping from previous generations but everything else was a little bit more subdued so yes five times the graphics horsepower sounds great except that in previous generations we were getting like ten times the graphics performance going from generation to generation and one of the real downsides of the PlayStation 4 was it as downright an anemic CPU right so I actually went to at a GDC one year Oh buddy his PlayStation experience but I went to a naughty dog talk right after they had ported the last of us from ps3 to ps4 and they had in some other simulations saying that the PlayStation 4 CPU was actually less powerful than what they had been working with on the PlayStation 3 now generally speaking I think that might be slightly overblown but there was absolutely no doubt that this was not the huge 10 times leap in performance that we had seen with previous generations and sadly it seems like that trend is just going to continue going into the next generation 7 years after the Xbox one and ps4 how does this new generation stack up so I'm gonna take the Xbox series X here for this example because it is clearly the more powerful of the next generation consoles and there's some good and some bad so first of all on the processor side we see a four times improvement to performance nice maybe not quite as big as we used to see in those early days but obviously an improvement is an improvement and the graphics are also a nice step forward we're getting eight times the teraflop number and realistically probably even a little bit more than that compared to the Xbox one now the memory sight isn't quite as impressive we're only getting double the memory but still there's a lot of good stuff here but the issue is that while the Xbox one and ps4 were built to a spec that was essentially equivalent to a low to mid range game PC from 2013 these new consoles are basically at the bleeding edge of PC hardware which means that they have pretty much gone as far as they can short of any of the crazy stuff that Sony used to do with like the ps3 or something we've hit sort of peak console and that it really is almost hit parity with the PlayStation PlayStation PC PC and PlayStation not the same thing of course the ps4 and Xbox one are not the only consoles of this generation as they both gotten mid-cycle refresh ins the PlayStation 4 Pro as well as the Xbox one X when you compare those to the nuke consul's it's not quite as an impressive of a jump so the xbox one acts was famously much much more powerful than the original xbox one which means that if you get all the number soup out of your head the series X only has a little bit over double the graphics horsepower and only about a third more memory now there are certainly other advantages in the SSD and the cpu but we are not on par to see any kind of 10x performance across the board with these new consoles whatsoever they're very good but they're just simply limits the we're starting to hit the consoles really have not hit in 20 years we're a very very long time Moore's law meant that we really did get doubling of transistors and therefore performance every couple years or so now that continued for a very long time but these days it is really tough to get those doublings and four times and the ten times performance like we used to write the best way to think about it is like this after 20-25 years of console development and the 3d space if there's an easy way to get more performance someone's definitely done it right now right like all the easy stuff Soph the board which means that for every couple of percentage of performance improvement on memory on the processor on the graphics all that stuff takes an enormous amount of work which just means that we don't see those 10x performance increases at all anymore which is fine it just means that our expectations of what consoles are going from one generation to the next have to shift with that another element as to why games that are on the next generation don't look better is actually a little bit of a simpler one at a certain point when games start looking pretty real it takes a whole lot more power to bring it from pretty real to really really real right there's a very steep curve there's a law of diminishing returns it's tough to basically make something go from good to great if you need to go from bad to okay to good but that next level is whoa hey more difficult so let's take an example of what was something really impressive to me back in the day which was Ryse son of Rome a 2013 Xbox one launch title now this game looked incredible it really did show the performance of the next generation consoles and while yes it might not be quite as nice looking as a later generation Lodge but it still is a major step forward however what do you do to make this look better right sure you can add more detail to the faces in sort of the old bigger worlds like there are the things you can do but it's sort of just taking that good and just making it a little bit better it doesn't really sort of bridge the gap in a way that previous generation consoles are able to do if you look at something like GTA 5 going from last generation to current generation what you saw was that yes the resolutions went up the performance went up you got more graphical options but at their core these games were very similar they were just enhanced versions and that really goes for I would say the vast majority of Xbox one and ps4 games compared to the previous generation counterparts you can make bigger worlds with more memory you can make more detailed character models but there's nothing that really separates these two consoles beyond just the mere four times more performance or five times more performance that the hardware is capable of now that's fine well obviously that's all you have to work with but there's an ace in the hole for these next-generation consoles that does go beyond just a few more vertexes and pixels and that is ray-tracing I'm sure you're sick of the r-tx on memes at this point but there really is something to be said for ray-tracing being the next level and adding realism to games and especially considering that knowledge of the PS 5 and Xbox series X have ray-tracing standard but PCs are very quickly adopting it it's already on most NVIDIA GPUs at this point and E is already committed to adding it and the thing is while yes ray-tracing is in its infancy right now a lot of the demos being kind of cool on PC but not making a big difference when the install base is there when pretty much every gamer has access to ray-tracing and developers have more time to really fully integrate it into their games we're gonna see some major advantages now you might be asking what exactly is ray tracing all about so previously was pretty much games since the dawn of 3d gaming lights were fairly static right sure they might be able to move a little bit but they were always fake it wasn't actually the way the light works in the real life however ray tracing does its best to emulate the way that real light actually bounce and scatters I mean there are some great versions of Minecraft with r-tx not on the PC but also on the Xbox side let's show this off nicely and that light can bounce multiple times just as a would in real life and this I think is a real key to making these next-generation games not just look like a HD HD remaster of ps3 or ps4 game but something which is magenta mately different now of course we're going to take advantage of the more powerful graphics and processors to build bigger worlds the SSDs are going to help Nally with load times but also helping enable some of these huge worlds but that's not really going to push us that much farther right the ability to do ray tracing and of course some of the other stuff that comes with it right so I know Sony's obviously taking advantage of their tempest engine to sort of not really do ray tracing for audio but to give you a much more visual experience when you can completely transform the look the feel and the sound of a game to be much more realistic than sort of the approximations that we've had up until this point to give you a graphic experience that looks kind of decent that's really where we're going to see these major advantages now are we there yet right now no but these new consoles and PCs in general right now are laying the groundwork for over the next couple years what we're going to see are some legitimately revolutionary gaming experiences maybe go all the way back to 2005 in 2006 to the dawn of HD gaming as we know it with the 360 and the ps3 they pushed forward on a lot of aspects and one of which was to push more resolution right those consoles were capable of gaming at 720p without many compromises obviously depending on the game you know we jumped up to ps4 and Xbox one really the target was bigger worlds at 1080p it wasn't massively pushing the envelope it was just nicer looking games more detail but ultimately it was about pushing that resolution to 1080p now when we got the mid cycle upgrades so the ps4 pro as well as the xbox 1x those consoles were pretty much entirely desiring around taking those 1080p games that you were running on your current console and playing them at 1440p or 4k right more pixels was good but the thing is while yes the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series acts can technically run 8k but we're not going to see that and I don't think any games are really going to be targeting 8k I mean no one really has a K TVs to begin with where these new consoles are putting their extra power is not only with stuff like ray tracing but also by giving you better pixels so this is something that I feel like most people are probably familiar with from the camera space right so yes your iPhone that you buy today they might cost you fifty hundred dollars has a 12 megapixel camera whereas for that same money there's a samsung galaxy s 20 Ultra with a hundred plus megapixels now that on paper sounds like of course you want the more megapixels but the thing is just more of something doesn't necessarily make a difference especially when you consider if you don't have an 8k T or 16 K TV you can't even tell the difference even if you did unless you're sitting like 6 inches away from the screen you might not be even able to tell which is we're focusing on higher quality pixels focusing on new features like ray tracing focusing on more detail worlds and honestly just bigger more expansive worlds is really the key here we're not chasing the resolution war anymore we're chasing the ability to give you a more immersive experience across the controller across the sound across the visuals you get the idea right there are a lot of things that have been laid here that I think over the next few years are really going to prove to be hugely instrumental in bringing gaming from the uncanny valley to maybe not fully realistic much much closer so no we will probably never again see the days of 10 times the performance across the board in just a few short years between generations what we can get for just a few hundred dollars is a box that gives you an incredible level of fidelity with decades worth of experience and work put into it that completely blows away anything I could have ever imagined when I first got my original PlayStation youwe've just gotten our first real look at Xbox series X gameplay and I think the sentiment might be slightly underwhelming so there were certainly some games that were standouts of course we have Assassin's Creed Game of Thrones I mean assassin's creed Valhalla but really the ones that jumped out to me was medium which I think they're a really good job of not really leaning heavily into the very sort of neon baked aesthetic of like some future world but instead something which actually looks really grounded in realism especially with the ray-tracing put on top but this of course brings up a very big question with so many of these games being crossed gen where you buy on Xbox one you get on Series X we shouldn't expect the envelope to be pushed that much but why exactly do so many of these games look very very similar to stuff we could have seen last generation I remember the first time that I saw 3d graphics running on the original PlayStation it was mind-blowing to me to see the realistic looking cars in Gran Turismo or the enormous Lea detailed worlds of final fantasy in a console that I could actually play at home Linux console was the Nintendo GameCube back when Nintendo really were on top of their game from a technical perspective I mean you look at games like smash bros melee or even something like Pokemon Colosseum which I played a ton of and it was a huge step forward and then when I got an Xbox 360 that was almost the biggest leap yet now at the time I actually was still using a CRT but even so when I first put in that Mirror's Edge DVD and got to really experience none of the incredibly clean art style but that incredible just world I was like wow where are we gonna go next but the problem has been that we really haven't gone that far over the last 15 years with the Xbox one and ps4 wall graphics looked better bringing it today there was seven years between the 360 and the Xbox one the actual improvement in graphics wasn't that impressive certainly nowhere near oh we had seen with previous generations of consoles and now that we're going into the Xbox Series X and PS 5 there's a real question here of why don't these games look better why don't we see these massive leaps like we used to going from like ps1 to ps2 well a little bit complicated but I don't think that we're seeing those massive gains anytime soon the game has completely shifted these days so take the original PlayStation one for example this launch with a 33 megahertz processor and three megabytes of RAM which was impressive enough to actually run full 3d games for maybe not the first time there was certainly a huge step forward but may have six years later we got the PlayStation 2 and it was an order of magnitude more powerful we went from a 33 megahertz processor to almost 300 megahertz we went from three megabytes of memory to over 30 megabytes and that was only in six years right I mean it's crazy to think about just how fast advancements really happened in those early days of 3d another six years later and we got the fat boy himself the PlayStation 3 Vista things up to a whole nother level as we went from a single core 300 megahertz processor to a seven core SPU essentially seven 3.2 gigahertz CPU cores and that was backed up by another almost tenfold improvement in memory and when you look at games like The Last of Us toward the end of the PlayStation 3s lifecycle it is clear that this was a quantum leap over the PlayStation 2 not an actual quantum leap that's probably a little bit harder but it was a huge huge improvement so when 2013 rolls around and we get our hands of the PlayStation 4 what we see is a very different so neat in a very different gaming industry as a whole so you see Sony is that company sort of had this weird mentality where they were very focused on this thing called making a profit and that is something that the PlayStation 3 famously did not do for a very long time so the issue with the ps3 was that even though it was wildly expensive out of the gate was like five six hundred bucks but even at that exorbitant price tag Sony were still probably losing money with every single console they sold now ultimately toward the end of the generation they had been able to work out the kinks drop a lot of the features that were in the launch ps3 and they're able to make at least some of their money back but the problem was that while the console was very much ahead of its time making money pretty important so when it came time to bring out the PlayStation 4 it was more conservative in pretty much every single aspect so yes it did have eight times as much memory which is pretty much on par with what we had seen jumping from previous generations but everything else was a little bit more subdued so yes five times the graphics horsepower sounds great except that in previous generations we were getting like ten times the graphics performance going from generation to generation and one of the real downsides of the PlayStation 4 was it as downright an anemic CPU right so I actually went to at a GDC one year Oh buddy his PlayStation experience but I went to a naughty dog talk right after they had ported the last of us from ps3 to ps4 and they had in some other simulations saying that the PlayStation 4 CPU was actually less powerful than what they had been working with on the PlayStation 3 now generally speaking I think that might be slightly overblown but there was absolutely no doubt that this was not the huge 10 times leap in performance that we had seen with previous generations and sadly it seems like that trend is just going to continue going into the next generation 7 years after the Xbox one and ps4 how does this new generation stack up so I'm gonna take the Xbox series X here for this example because it is clearly the more powerful of the next generation consoles and there's some good and some bad so first of all on the processor side we see a four times improvement to performance nice maybe not quite as big as we used to see in those early days but obviously an improvement is an improvement and the graphics are also a nice step forward we're getting eight times the teraflop number and realistically probably even a little bit more than that compared to the Xbox one now the memory sight isn't quite as impressive we're only getting double the memory but still there's a lot of good stuff here but the issue is that while the Xbox one and ps4 were built to a spec that was essentially equivalent to a low to mid range game PC from 2013 these new consoles are basically at the bleeding edge of PC hardware which means that they have pretty much gone as far as they can short of any of the crazy stuff that Sony used to do with like the ps3 or something we've hit sort of peak console and that it really is almost hit parity with the PlayStation PlayStation PC PC and PlayStation not the same thing of course the ps4 and Xbox one are not the only consoles of this generation as they both gotten mid-cycle refresh ins the PlayStation 4 Pro as well as the Xbox one X when you compare those to the nuke consul's it's not quite as an impressive of a jump so the xbox one acts was famously much much more powerful than the original xbox one which means that if you get all the number soup out of your head the series X only has a little bit over double the graphics horsepower and only about a third more memory now there are certainly other advantages in the SSD and the cpu but we are not on par to see any kind of 10x performance across the board with these new consoles whatsoever they're very good but they're just simply limits the we're starting to hit the consoles really have not hit in 20 years we're a very very long time Moore's law meant that we really did get doubling of transistors and therefore performance every couple years or so now that continued for a very long time but these days it is really tough to get those doublings and four times and the ten times performance like we used to write the best way to think about it is like this after 20-25 years of console development and the 3d space if there's an easy way to get more performance someone's definitely done it right now right like all the easy stuff Soph the board which means that for every couple of percentage of performance improvement on memory on the processor on the graphics all that stuff takes an enormous amount of work which just means that we don't see those 10x performance increases at all anymore which is fine it just means that our expectations of what consoles are going from one generation to the next have to shift with that another element as to why games that are on the next generation don't look better is actually a little bit of a simpler one at a certain point when games start looking pretty real it takes a whole lot more power to bring it from pretty real to really really real right there's a very steep curve there's a law of diminishing returns it's tough to basically make something go from good to great if you need to go from bad to okay to good but that next level is whoa hey more difficult so let's take an example of what was something really impressive to me back in the day which was Ryse son of Rome a 2013 Xbox one launch title now this game looked incredible it really did show the performance of the next generation consoles and while yes it might not be quite as nice looking as a later generation Lodge but it still is a major step forward however what do you do to make this look better right sure you can add more detail to the faces in sort of the old bigger worlds like there are the things you can do but it's sort of just taking that good and just making it a little bit better it doesn't really sort of bridge the gap in a way that previous generation consoles are able to do if you look at something like GTA 5 going from last generation to current generation what you saw was that yes the resolutions went up the performance went up you got more graphical options but at their core these games were very similar they were just enhanced versions and that really goes for I would say the vast majority of Xbox one and ps4 games compared to the previous generation counterparts you can make bigger worlds with more memory you can make more detailed character models but there's nothing that really separates these two consoles beyond just the mere four times more performance or five times more performance that the hardware is capable of now that's fine well obviously that's all you have to work with but there's an ace in the hole for these next-generation consoles that does go beyond just a few more vertexes and pixels and that is ray-tracing I'm sure you're sick of the r-tx on memes at this point but there really is something to be said for ray-tracing being the next level and adding realism to games and especially considering that knowledge of the PS 5 and Xbox series X have ray-tracing standard but PCs are very quickly adopting it it's already on most NVIDIA GPUs at this point and E is already committed to adding it and the thing is while yes ray-tracing is in its infancy right now a lot of the demos being kind of cool on PC but not making a big difference when the install base is there when pretty much every gamer has access to ray-tracing and developers have more time to really fully integrate it into their games we're gonna see some major advantages now you might be asking what exactly is ray tracing all about so previously was pretty much games since the dawn of 3d gaming lights were fairly static right sure they might be able to move a little bit but they were always fake it wasn't actually the way the light works in the real life however ray tracing does its best to emulate the way that real light actually bounce and scatters I mean there are some great versions of Minecraft with r-tx not on the PC but also on the Xbox side let's show this off nicely and that light can bounce multiple times just as a would in real life and this I think is a real key to making these next-generation games not just look like a HD HD remaster of ps3 or ps4 game but something which is magenta mately different now of course we're going to take advantage of the more powerful graphics and processors to build bigger worlds the SSDs are going to help Nally with load times but also helping enable some of these huge worlds but that's not really going to push us that much farther right the ability to do ray tracing and of course some of the other stuff that comes with it right so I know Sony's obviously taking advantage of their tempest engine to sort of not really do ray tracing for audio but to give you a much more visual experience when you can completely transform the look the feel and the sound of a game to be much more realistic than sort of the approximations that we've had up until this point to give you a graphic experience that looks kind of decent that's really where we're going to see these major advantages now are we there yet right now no but these new consoles and PCs in general right now are laying the groundwork for over the next couple years what we're going to see are some legitimately revolutionary gaming experiences maybe go all the way back to 2005 in 2006 to the dawn of HD gaming as we know it with the 360 and the ps3 they pushed forward on a lot of aspects and one of which was to push more resolution right those consoles were capable of gaming at 720p without many compromises obviously depending on the game you know we jumped up to ps4 and Xbox one really the target was bigger worlds at 1080p it wasn't massively pushing the envelope it was just nicer looking games more detail but ultimately it was about pushing that resolution to 1080p now when we got the mid cycle upgrades so the ps4 pro as well as the xbox 1x those consoles were pretty much entirely desiring around taking those 1080p games that you were running on your current console and playing them at 1440p or 4k right more pixels was good but the thing is while yes the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series acts can technically run 8k but we're not going to see that and I don't think any games are really going to be targeting 8k I mean no one really has a K TVs to begin with where these new consoles are putting their extra power is not only with stuff like ray tracing but also by giving you better pixels so this is something that I feel like most people are probably familiar with from the camera space right so yes your iPhone that you buy today they might cost you fifty hundred dollars has a 12 megapixel camera whereas for that same money there's a samsung galaxy s 20 Ultra with a hundred plus megapixels now that on paper sounds like of course you want the more megapixels but the thing is just more of something doesn't necessarily make a difference especially when you consider if you don't have an 8k T or 16 K TV you can't even tell the difference even if you did unless you're sitting like 6 inches away from the screen you might not be even able to tell which is we're focusing on higher quality pixels focusing on new features like ray tracing focusing on more detail worlds and honestly just bigger more expansive worlds is really the key here we're not chasing the resolution war anymore we're chasing the ability to give you a more immersive experience across the controller across the sound across the visuals you get the idea right there are a lot of things that have been laid here that I think over the next few years are really going to prove to be hugely instrumental in bringing gaming from the uncanny valley to maybe not fully realistic much much closer so no we will probably never again see the days of 10 times the performance across the board in just a few short years between generations what we can get for just a few hundred dollars is a box that gives you an incredible level of fidelity with decades worth of experience and work put into it that completely blows away anything I could have ever imagined when I first got my original PlayStation you