The well-informed leaker “Tez2” claims that some of the mid-gen upgrades for the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X are already with the developers or will be there by early 2023 at the latest. As with PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, faster hardware would be used there.
Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 were released at the end of 2020. Although they’ve been on the market for almost two years, it’s still difficult to get the PS5 at the suggested retail price. According to a leaker, mid-gen PS4 Pro and Xbox One X-style upgrades are still in the works, and most developers have even received dev kits. Anyone who has been left empty-handed should be given a mid-gen upgrade by the beginning of next year.
When asked, Leaker “Tez2” explains that he did not dare to look into the crystal ball. He got the information from a reliable source. Now you can philosophize for a long time about the extent to which the terms leaker and safe source go together at all. At least it can be stated that “Tez2” is one of the better informed actors within the rumor mill.
Xbox Series X and Playstation 5: mid-gen upgrade 2023 not an unrealistic time window
There were three years between the release of the Xbox One and Xbox One X or Playstation 4 and PS4 Pro. The current generation of consoles followed another three years later. Against this background, a mid-gen upgrade from Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X that is looming on the horizon would not automatically be a pipe dream. However, it remains questionable whether studios are really already programming on dev kits. If so, the first picture leaks shouldn’t be far away.
One can only speculate about the specifications of a possible “mid-gen”. In the previous generation, the GPU and the combined memory in particular had been drilled out, but the slow Jaguar cores were basically only clocked higher. With Zen 2 cores, the PS5 and Xbox Series started much more competitively than their predecessors compared to PCs at the end of 2020, but it cannot be ruled out that newer CPU architectures will be used in an upgrade. On the GPU side, it could end up with RDNA 3 and/or more compute units.
Whether a timely upgrade is needed will depend on various developments. Modern upscaling methods such as DLSS 3.0 or FSR 2.0 are now achieving such good results that upgrades can definitely be put off. On the other hand, ray tracing is likely to play an increasingly important role in the coming years, and this is where RDNA 2 is still comparatively weak. The Gotham Knights example shows meanwhilethat 60 fps is not set on the current consoles either.
