What awaits us with the next generation of consoles? We have begun hearing about what we might expect from the next generation Xbox and PlayStation alike, but until they are officially announced, it’s hard to tell what they might have to offer.
According to Marc-André Jutras, a veteran of Activision and Ubisoft, and currently working with Cradle Games on the upcoming science fiction RPG Hellpoint, the next generation consoles will offer 4K, and 60fps… but not necessarily at the same time.
“Not sure about the 4K part, that’s probably the biggest hardware leap that we’ve had in the last generation. Because suddenly instead of rendering 2 million pixels, you’re rendering 8 million,” he said, speaking exclusively with GamingBolt. “And now we have 8K monitors and none of the hardware can actually play at that resolution properly, it’s just too much to render. PlayStation 4 Pro is supposed to be made for 4K in theory, but then you have games run at 1080p and 60fps on a normal PS4, but they won’t run at 60fps in 4K on PS4 Pro.
“So it would be really awesome if the PS5 was able to get to 60fps with 4K, but I have questions about that. I’m not sure how much we will be able to do that. And like I said, there are some developers who don’t care about 60fps, like big AAA developers pretty much don’t care to hit 60fps. I don’t think they will do 60fps.”
The one up side, he says, is that even if a game can run at 30fps at 4K resolution, it should be able to run at 60fps at 1080p across the board—so hypothetically, we could see every next generation game being 1080p and 60fps.
“One nice thing is the next big AAA game that comes out that runs at 30fps on 4K, it will run at 60fps on 1080p, which is pretty awesome, especially for people who don’t have 4K. For them, the next generation is pretty much 60fps on all games.”
I am the kind of person who always prefers framerate to resolution, as many others do, so I would love it if we were guaranteed 1080p and 60fps with the PS5 and Xbox Scarlett. That said, I can imagine there will be many players, and many developers, who will want to prioritize resolution above all else.