Has the PS5 already killed the PlayStation 4? Now, this is not going to be a fancy review full of graphics, but it's something that I have been thinking about a lot the last few days. It all really stems from Cyberpunk 2077.
Look, you've seen the memes at this point. You know this is a game, which looks phenomenal on a high end or even a mid-range gaming PC. It looks pretty decent on something like an Xbox Series X or PS5. But you put it up on an Xbox One or PS4 and it looks like garbage town.
Now, of course, recently Sony took the very bold step of straight-up removing Cyberpunk from the PlayStation Store and offering anyone who purchased it a refund. And that even goes for the PS5 version because let's not forgotten Cyberpunk while it is playable on the PS5 and the Series S and the Series X is not really optimized for those consoles.
Instead, that is a version of the game which is simply running in backwards compatibility with a couple of extra tweaks. The full PS5 and Series Xpatches are coming later. And that's got me thinking previously, you wind all the way back to 2013 when the last-gen consoles came out, the Xbox One and the PS4, things were very different. We were coming off of a very long, historically a very long console generation with PS3 as well as the Xbox 360. Those consoles were phenomenal when they first came out. They were really ahead of the game, especially the PS3 technically and they had a lot of good years of life in them. But toward the ends of 2011,2012, 2013, it was very clear that those consoles were holding back the entire gaming industry, right? I mean, it was, you could get away with it.
I mean, you look at games like Crysis, which were able to scale from an Xbox and from a PS3 all the way up. But frame rates were terrible. It just was way too much to handle. GTA 5 ran on the PS3 and the 360 with 512 megs of RAM, right? I mean, that is crazy town considering just how massive that game was. So clearly, when the PS4 and when the Xbox One came out we were in dire need of an upgrade when it comes to the consoles when it comes to graphics and just pushing things forward, right? And I don't want to be unfair, the PS4 and the Xbox One did push things forward. They had a massive improvement in memory. You went from half a gig to eight gigs of memory. It was much faster than the PS4.
That did enable a lot of the much higher resolution textures in the much larger world. And they did have decent CPUs. Although really, that was sort of one of the main drawbacks of the last generation. And when you look at how we've had seven years of the PS4 and the Xbox One, there have been a lot of great games. A lot of games that have finally got away from that 25, 30 FPS kind of stuff that we used to deal with. And now they're running at a smooth 60. Not in all cases, but I would say a decent amount of the games to this last generation were fairly smooth.
But now you look at where we are today, at the end of 2020, these brand new consoles have all just launched. And I have real doubts on how long the PS4 and the Xbox One really have left to be useful, right?
Now, if you own a PS4 or an Xbox One, you're probably not thrilled about the idea that you're a brand new console or maybe not brand new, but your several-year-old console is like immediately becoming obsolete. And I don't think it's going to be that fast, right? I mean, just purely it down to the fact that PS5s and Xboxes are all constrained right now. And it's going to take one, two, three years for that install base to be able to build-up to the point where it is easy and safe for console developers and everyone to kind of start moving away from the last generation of consoles.
But unlike previous generations, where when the PS4 and when the Xbox One came out there were some nice looking games, but there weren't a lot of things that completely blew your mind, right? I mean, especially when we look back sort of in comparison with some of the other console generation leaps, they just weren't that ambitious, right? But when you look at what we've got with the PS5 and the Xbox Series X, it is a different story altogether. Both of these consoles and I'll throw the Series S in there, even though it's slightly sort of gimped in some ways, but both all these new consoles are very much equivalent with the best that the PC space has to offer, right? 8-core Zen 2 processors, right?
I mean, the processors in these chips alone on the consoles are equivalent to $200,$250 gaming grade CPUs on the Ryzen side, right? The graphics support not only ray tracing, but it's the latest RDNA 2.0. Again, AMD doesn't even sell an equivalent graphics card in the PC space right now, but it would be well well well above the kind of price that you'd be talking about for the entire console, right? The SSDs that are standard inside the Series S, the Series X and the PS5leagues, leagues better than what we had on the PS4and the Xbox One, right? And all these combined means that this generation of consoles I truly do believe is way closer to the PC than we've pretty much seen since like the Super Nintendo days and the N64 days when consoles really were leading the charge for the gaming space.
But when you look at games like Cyberpunk, which it's it's a hard case, I don't want to single out one game. Obviously, everyone's talking about Cyberpunk right now and for a good reason. But this is a game that been in development for what, seven, eight years now? I mean, most of the time that the, I think actually it was announced before the PS4 and the Xbox One came out, clearly should have been developed with a real emphasis on these current generation consoles, right? And it does run decently on like the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X. But when you look at how a game like this, which was clearly designed for PC first, but should have had a real emphasis on the consoles, it's completely fallen flat.
When you look at a performance like this on the base Xbox One, which looks like it's a Switch game, right? I mean, it just looks awful. The frame rate is terrible. I mean, it's just it's not something that I would feel comfortable spending $60 on. Clearly Sony agrees because they removed it from the PlayStation Store, right? I mean, we've seen a lot of games get delayed.
I mean, so many people gave Microsoft all kinds of for delaying Halo Infinite a full year. But now that you look back at what's happened to Cyberpunk when was last time you saw a game delayed after it was already released, right? I mean, that is crazy to me. So one of my main thoughts going into the generation as a whole, is how long does the PS4 and the Xbox One really have, right? Because right off the bat, a couple months in, it is clear that those consoles are holding back this generation.
So there are a couple of thoughts here. First of all, it does help that the Xbox One X and the PS4 Pro exist because clearly, those are a little bit more reasonable. They're not using seven-year-old hardware and realistically CPUs that were not powerful by 2006 standards, right? So that clearly holds things back. But the issue is, is that unless I'm wildly wrong and if so please correct me in the comments. But as far as I understand, you as a developer cannot release an Xbox One game that only supports the Xbox One X, but drops the base console, right? You have to treat them together.
If you're releasing a PS4 game it has to support PS4 and PS4 Pro. Otherwise, forget it. Go straight to PS5. Now as a developer that would make me very rightfully nervous because there are over 100million PS4s out there. If I want to sell, you know, 10 million copies of FIFA or whatever, you can't. You gotta sell it on a console that at least has 10 million, right? I mean, obviously, thePS5 and the Series X are wildly successful right now. But it's going to just take a while for them to sort of hit any kind of critical mass. So on one hand, there's no way that the PS4 and the Xbox One can go away.
But you look at stuff like Cyberpunk, right? You look at how far technology has come and how honestly how weak that the PS4 and the Xbox One were from day one. It's hard for me to imagine that experience getting better, right? I mean, PC space has come a huge, huge way, not only just in the last seven years, but even the last couple of years, right? You look at the RX 6000 series of graphics cards. You look at what AMD has done with Ryzen processors. You look at the RTX series and the 30 series like there's so much that is advanced and there's so much more performance and capability available on the high end of the PC space. That it really makes the PS4 and the Xbox One absolutely pale in comparison, right?
Now, yes, there's an argument to be made that you purchased a PS4 for $400 in 2013. You've got your money where it was worth out of it. It's time to move on. But it's just not simply that easy. First of all, a lot of people certainly don't wanna go to PC. And while yes, I enjoy consoles and PCs, I'm not going to be out here judging Little Timmy for not wanting to build his own gaming PC and instead just playPS4 with his friends.
I mean, obviously, that's not a realistic sort of scenario. But when you look at how far things have come, I think there's a real point that's coming far quicker than I expected where those original consoles and I'll throw the enhanced in there with it, but I'm really talking mostly about the PS4 and the Xbox One are falling severely behind. They're falling behind at a rate that I mean, Cyberpunk I do think is a bad example because it is sort of the worst-case scenario. But this game should have been much better. And am I going to sit here and tell you that Halo Infinite is going to look like absolute but on the Xbox One base model? Probably if I'm being honest.
But I do think there's a real point to be had as far as talking about these last-gen consoles and trying to get moved past them as quickly as possible to move the entire industry forward. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't other uses for these consoles. Now I do think cloud gaming does play a role. In fact, we actually did an entire review on our second post, This Is, talking about this exact subject before Cyberpunk was pulled from the PlayStation Store.
But there are ways to have more life out of the previous generation of consoles, right? I do think when you have stuff like Xbox Game Pass where you stream your Game Pass ultimate games that are running on a series X in the cloud on your base Xbox One, that's a great way to give it more life. And while we get morePS5s and Xboxes out there it's going to take a little while to build that base.
But sort of I've just been really thinking a lot about this idea that if we are two months into this brand new generation and the last-gen of consoles are falling flat in such a hard way, that should say something because these new consoles are just such a better well-rounded package. And it helps that both the Xbox and the Play Station side this time, have proper backwards compatibility, right? So you can buy a PS5 and it'll do everything your PS4 did and it'll do it better and it'll play PS5 games.
You can buy yourself a Series S or a Series X. And as long as you don't need the discs on the Series S side it will do everything that your Xbox One did and much, much better. And so as we move forward into 2021, and 2022, I'm not gonna be surprised to see the PS4 and the Xbox One have a much sharper sort of drop off in the support of the games, right? I mean again, we're already seeing it with things like Flight Simulator dropping the base console support. Is it going to go away overnight?
No. Do I think that they should just, you know, pull the plug out? Of course not, right? I mean, there's just, you simply cannot get around the fact that as of a couple months ago Sony we're still selling brand new base PS4s, right? Microsoft was still selling brand new Xbox One Ss. Those consoles cannot just go obsolete overnight. What I do think we're going to see is a much, much faster roll off of the last-gen consoles in favour of, of course, not only the PS5 and the Series X and Series S, but of course on the PC side because things have moved so quickly, so aggressively that I think it would be a disservice to everyone and gamers as a whole if these last-gen consoles hang around for three, four more years, and we get Cyberpunk style ports, right?
Because if you have a PS4 and you spend $60 on Cyberpunk and you get this kind of performance, how could you possibly be okay with that, right? I mean, that almost is a sales pitch to go up to a PS5 or Series X by itself or realistically sales pitch to go buy a PC. So I'm very curious.
What do you think about the state of the PS4 and the Xbox One today? Something I've thought a lot about it's something that I do think is aggressively changing. But the fact that we've had a major AAA game which has been announced years and years and years and years ago, that was obviously developed with the PS4 and the Xbox One in mind the whole time. And it has not only performed so badly, but it's been literally removed from the Play Station Store, it's been recalled.
That's a crazy thing to me. And I think that says a lot about what we should expect out of that PS4 and out that Xbox One over a coming couple of years. Anyway, thank you very much for reading this impromptu rant. Make sure to follow to the blog if you're interested in more coverage of not only the next generation of consoles, but what's left for your sweet little PS4 and Xbox One, which is going to be collecting some more dust over the next few years.
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