With all the speculation around the Playstation 5 and next Xbox and what these as-yet hypothetical next-gen platforms are capable of, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees: hardware above and beyond what any potential ninth-gen console will likely use is already available on high-end PC. 4K/60 FPS gaming, at close to maximum settings has been a viable proposal for nearly two years now, at least since the launch of the original Pascal Titan X, months after the GTX 1080.
And, with the rather presence of both AMD’s Vega cards and the Ryzen line of CPUs, the actual performance of the components most likely to feature in the PS5/next Xbox is also a known quantity: this level CPU and graphics grunt allows for high(er) framerate gaming at 4K with today’s titles, albeit with some nips and tucks here and there. The console space was far more interesting a decade or more ago: There was no AMD roadmap you could point to to definitively predict how, say, the PS3 would hold up. But with both Microsoft and Sony working with AMD to bring down prices–and expectations–the rumour mill these days is as much about validating what’s essentially common knowledge as anything else.
