As the PS5 and Xbox Series get older, what will the next generation of games console be like: Now that the Switch 2 has been out for a while, things seem quiet in the gaming world. Too quiet. There’s usually something just about visible on the horizon, some rumour about a great new console that will blow the others out of the water, an unreleased king to command a place by our TVs.
But not right now. While we’ve seen a leak of PlayStation 6 specs that may or may not be real, we know basically nothing about any new PSP or Xbox consoles at the time of writing. The current console generation has been running since the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series were launched at the end of 2020, and has seen a refresh of one of its biggest players, the PS5. Nintendo seems to have retired from the front line of the console wars since it released the Wii in 2006, instead concentrating on creating a line of lower-powered consoles that blur the line between a box under your TV and a handheld machine.
Switch 2 is not to be underestimated, but if it’s the latest 4K graphics with cutting-edge rendering techniques running at improbable framerates you’re looking for, Nintendo is perhaps not going to provide it. That task falls to Sony and Microsoft, and a recent PS6 specs leak via the YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead also gives us insight into the next Xbox, as the two console titans tend to be similar in terms of power and the games they can run.
The leak reveals a super-charged PS5 Pro, offering up to three times the graphics performance, and with a possible handheld companion that sounds rather like a faster Switch. If it’s real, it’s not exactly a revolution, but is also exactly what we expected. The release date, so we’re told, will be in time for Christmas 2027.
PCS ARE EVERYWHERE
Clues about what technologies the next generation of consoles will offer can be picked up from the world of PC gaming. This is a strange place, where people pay five times as much to play pretty much the same games as consoles, only a bit more smoothly, in higher resolution, with more graphical bells and whistles and on incredible gaming machines that light up like Christmas trees and consume more power than an office block’s heating system.
And the thing is, most of the current consoles are little PCs themselves. Ever since the PlayStation 4 (and the original Xbox, though Microsoft went a different way for the 360) home consoles have used chips made by the same companies behind the components in gaming PCs to create their interactive worlds. They may not run anything we’d recognise as Windows or macOS, but underneath all that software they’re surprisingly similar to PCs. And that means tech from PCs filters into them. PC graphics is currently home to technologies that are starting to make their presence felt in the console space, but which we can only expect to see more of in the future.
The first is ray-tracing, which more accurately simulates the lighting in a game scene by calculating the path of light rays through it, following them as they bounce off surfaces to create reflections and give everything a more realistic look as you move around the space. This is great, and games such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Doom: The Dark Ages show off what ray-tracing can do. The only problem is that it uses up an enormous amount of resources, requiring powerful graphics chips with specialised hardware, and that’s why you won’t find it used much in the current generation of consoles, even if their graphics hardware theoretically supports it. The PS5 Pro and Switch 2 can manage it, but in most cases it results in such a big hit to performance it’s not worth turning it on.
In the next generation of home consoles, we can expect to see this technology become fully realised, and indeed the PS6 specs leak suggests ray-tracing performance could be up to 12 times better than PS5’s. The current generation of Nvidia graphics cards on PC is capable of playing the latest games in 4K with ray-tracing and an acceptable framerate, though this last variable is often down to the optimisation of the game, which is something consoles have a huge advantage in. While the PC landscape is made up of pre-built desktops, laptops, handhelds like the Steam Deck, and enormous throbbing DIY towers put together from piles of parts, consoles only have one configuration. This means game makers only have to target one performance envelope, they know that every time their game is started up on, say, a PlayStation 5, it will be exactly the same as every other PlayStation 5. And that means they can use all kinds of tricks to get their game to run well on that hardware, without having to worry that they might make it run worse on a different combination of parts.
MORE POWER
So if the next generation of consoles uses ray-tracing as standard, it will require more powerful graphics hardware onboard. And it looks like it will come from chipmaker AMD, which has provided the innards for PS4 and 5, as well as Xbox One and the current Xbox Series consoles. This is good news, as having a stable architecture for a couple of generations means the likelihood of the new consoles being backwards compatible with older games is high, and game developers don’t have to get their heads around a new way of doing things.
There’s even a better, more intensive version of ray-tracing called path-tracing, which can bring a gaming PC with one of the latest graphics cards to its knees. We probably won’t see this used in next-gen consoles, as the hardware cost and the noise made by the cooling system would be too high, but it does make game lighting look incredibly natural, and is the sort of thing we’ll see more of in the future.
The second piece of graphics tech that’s shaking things up is upscaling, known by Nvidia as DLSS and by AMD as FSR. It runs the game at an internal resolution that’s lower than the output you see on the screen, which allows it to run faster, as there are fewer pixels to compute. Just before it’s sent to the screen, an ML model is used to blow the image up to the desired resolution. The latest versions of this tech can interpolate extra frames too, so while a game may be running at 1080p and 30fps internally, you get 4K and 60fps on your screen.
This isn’t without its problems. It can add latency to the game, which is a time lag between your control inputs and seeing the result on the screen, which isn’t ideal for fast-paced shooters or anything else that relies on extremely quick reactions. And it can add softness and even artefacts like coloured speckles to the images. However, it’s improving all the time, and in coalition with ray-tracing can lead to extremely realistic games that run at a high resolution and smooth framerate. The Switch 2, with its Nvidia components, already supports this, and we can expect to see something like it on all next-gen consoles.
IT’S THE SOFTWARE
Nobody buys game consoles because of their hardware, or even the graphics features they’re capable of. Or at least they shouldn’t. A console is just an inert box that sits under your TV until you do something with it, and that means you should buy a console based on the games it can play, or at the very least the promise of the games it will play one day. If you believed the reviews, the Switch 2 at launch was only capable of playing Mario Kart World, which while a fine game isn’t really worth shelling out over £400 for. There were other games, but a console’s launch lineup is rarely an indicator of the quality of the titles a console will support during its lifetime.
So Switch 2 gets ports of Cyberpunk 2077, Hitman: World of Assassination, Yakuza 0, Street Fighter 6, a Sonic game and a puzzle game, plus futuristic racer Fast Fusion, which aims to fill the gap left by the Wipeout series’ current hiatus. The thing to note about almost all of these games is that you can play them elsewhere, particularly on PC. The ever-closer relationship between consoles and PCs isn’t likely to lead to an outright merger of the two types of box in the next generation, but if Microsoft gets its way that idea is not off the table. The first shred of evidence for this is the existence of the ROG Xbox Ally X from ASUS, one of the worst-named pieces of gaming hardware in an already crowded field. It’s a handheld gaming PC that boots straight into the Xbox app rather than a Windows desktop, and hopefully will connect to multiple gaming stores so you can play your Steam games alongside your Xbox ones.
Xbox games are already available to play on PC if you want to, but a hardware announcement trailer from AMD and Microsoft brought up the idea of being able to “play the games you want with the people you want anywhere you want”. More importantly, it claimed Microsoft was investing in next-gen hardware “across console, handheld, PC, cloud and accessories”. Leaving aside the unlikely idea of playing games on a printer (more likely a VR headset) this does seem to point to an attempt to unify gaming so a title that runs on one box will also run on another, with the savegame synced via an internet connection so that you pick up where you left off.
And this sounds a bit like the Switch, with its ability to dock with your TV, or possibly a portable PC used as a secondary gaming device to a more powerful gaming tower. The end result here could be that you can play the same game on your PC, console, handheld and phone (hopefully only having to pay for it once) with the same save, which sounds like the ideal way to integrate gaming into your day and not keep these important works of art siloed among walls put up by platform holders and digital stores. After all, you can watch the same Netflix movie on a multitude of different devices using just a username and password, so why not do that for games?
Ah, but... Netflix doesn’t download the movie to your device, but streams it bit by bit over the internet, perhaps using a small amount of storage space as a cache to avoid stuttering. With a game download, you need hundreds of gigabytes of storage space that’s fast enough to supply data without long loading times, which is why the current-gen home consoles (and PCs) use SSDs.
Game streaming is very definitely a thing, however, and we’re going to see more of it in the next generation. In fact, it might be the answer to the universal gaming machine that Microsoft seems to be dreaming of. It works by running the game on a server in a data centre somewhere – location isn’t important, but it’s better if it’s closer to the player, at least in the same country. The player’s controller inputs are sent over the internet to the server, and the video output is sent back the other way. Thanks to efficient compression and fast internet connections, it really can work, and many major players in the video-gaming market have their own cloud-gaming service that you can access with a monthly subscription.
THE WAY WE PAY
Oh yes, that’s another thing. The way we pay for games is likely to change to a subscription model. The era of buying movies, music and TV shows on a shiny disc has already come to an end thanks first to downloads and now streaming, and subscription models are just the next step. It already exists in the form of Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, and allows you access to a wide catalogue of games as long as you keep paying every month. Cancel the direct debit, and you lose the ability to play them.
There’s no denying it’s enormously more convenient to flick through a library of downloaded games waiting on an SSD than it is to search for the right game box, discover that the wrong disc is inside it, find the right disc, eject the one that’s in the console, put it in the wrong box, then insert the disc and wait for it to load before playing, but streaming means you’ll never have to worry about the space on your SSD, wait for a game to download, or buy an expansion drive.
The only problem with streaming (and downloading) is that it relies on a fast internet connection, and Microsoft recommends at least a 10Mbps download speed to use its streaming service. The median broadband speed in the UK for 2023 was 73.21Mbps, which would seem to be more than enough, but this is skewed by very fast fibre-optic connections at one end and slow rural ADSL at the other. You also need to make sure the last link in the chain – the connection between your console and your internet router – is up to snuff, with a 5 or 6GHz connection or an old-fashioned Ethernet cable preferred lest a lack of bandwidth or a Wi-Fi dropout caused by interference interrupt your game.
Price levels are also an issue. When the PlayStation 5 and more recently the Switch 2 were announced, their prices were considered by some on social media to be too high. A ‘low’ price (though still over £400) associated with the PS6 leak could be an attempt by Sony to address this, as the PS4 launched at £349 in the UK and benefitted from this as the Xbox One was £429. Likewise, the price of individual games has risen from £40 to £60 and above, meaning playing games is a more expensive hobby than ever. When you consider the amount of time and effort it takes to produce a game that can last more than 100 hours, or more if you get sucked into online multiplayer, from teams of hundreds of artists, programmers, writers and more, then the cost makes sense as creative jobs are valuable additions to wider culture and the economy. But it does make for a large single payment.
This means potentially fewer games for those who like to build a library of discs (or cartridges for Switch 2 owners) but makes subscriptions more tempting, especially if you’re the sort of player who likes to skip from game to game rather than sinking tens of hours into each one. Disc drives are likely to disappear from future consoles, as they dedicate themselves to downloads and streaming, so your library may not be playable even if the console is compatible.
WHIP OUT YOUR HANDHELD
When it comes to handheld consoles, much of the influence is coming from another direction: phones. Not only have touchscreen devices become powerful enough to run games on their own processors, but they usually have excellent wireless networking capabilities, making them ideal for game streaming. Hook one up to a Bluetooth controller, or a snap-on case with thumbsticks and buttons, and you’ve got all you need for gaming, in your pocket.
Tablets bring a larger screen to the party, and even more processing power and battery life thanks to just being bigger. The idea of a ‘gaming tablet’ hasn’t been seized on completely by manufacturers. There are iPads and Android tablets with better processors, such as the iPad Air 2025 with an M3 chip inside, and ASUS’ Z13 Windows tablet that’s a PC with a bit of gaming grunt, but touchscreen gaming is largely relegated to games that better suit the way we use our phones. With less time to game, mobile titles need to be quick bursts of entertainment instead of long and involved experiences.
Instead, gaming handhelds tend to be PCs. There’s the Switch, of course, and Sony makes the PlayStation Portal which can stream games from a paired PlayStation 5 console (and there’s a persistent rumour of a new portable PlayStation, but nothing has yet been revealed), but if you want to play the latest games on the move right now what you want is the Steam Deck or one of the many other handheld PCs that sprang up in its wake. They’re low-power devices compared to a desktop or even laptop PC, and are playing games at low graphics settings and resolutions, but they work, and that’s the important thing.
The handhelds are usually dedicated gaming machines rather than multipurpose devices like laptops. They have game controllers built into their casings, and some don’t run Windows but SteamOS, a version of Linux set up to run games from the Steam digital store and nothing else. In this way, they blur the line between PC and console in a way we’re sure to see more of. In the same way the smartphone became our music player, camera, diary and wallet, so we can expect it to become our PC and games console too. Samsung phones already have the ability to display a desktop much like that of a Chromebook when connected to an external monitor, and Google’s Pixel phones are following suit.
It’s not a big jump from there to a future in which handheld devices act like the Switch, able to dock with larger screens and receive a performance boost from being plugged into the mains, perhaps running a traditional PC desktop too. Convergence is a constant in entertainment – big stacking hi-fi systems have become small multi-functional devices, and your TV now does the job of various disc-players and decoder boxes. It’s only reasonable to expect consoles, handhelds, laptops and perhaps even phones to go the same way.
So that’s the future of gaming consoles, as seen through the lens of 2025. It’s more like a phone, more like a PC, and may be something you can take with you wherever you go. The number of devices we are likely to own will go down, while their cost will inevitably go up, and subscriptions mean we can choose whatever games we like, even travelling back to replay cherished games from our youth alongside the latest graphical showcases. It’s a change from the old ways of owning cartridges that will only play on one machine, but one we’ve already embraced for movies and TV. One thing is certain, however: games will only get better.