It's been seven years since PS4 and Xbox One were released

which means only one thing,

time for the next generation.

At this point both the PS5 and Xbox Series X

are officially coming out,

so that leaves me with four questions.

When do they come out?

How powerful are they?

What exactly is new?

And how much will they cost?

The release dates are pretty straightforward,

both Sony and Microsoft have gone on record

saying that their consoles

will be coming out holiday of 2020,

which very likely means either October

or November of this year.

If it's anything like last generation,

they'll likely come out really close together.

Back in 2013, the Playstation 4 came out exactly one week

ahead of the Xbox One here in North America.

One thing to consider are the announcements.

So Microsoft of course,

surprise dropped a ton of information

on the Series X back at the Game Awards last year,

however Sony, while they've been talking about the PS5,

have yet to do their official announcement for it yet.

So based on rumors,

we should expect that to happen very soon,

so make sure to subscribe to the channel

so you're kept up to date

with the latest on these next gen consoles.

A difficult question is exactly how powerful

are the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X?

Now to start out with,

we actually do have a fair bit of official information.

Both the PS5 and Series X are taking advantage

of AMD technology on the CPU and GPU side.

Processors are likely to be one of the biggest jumps,

so Xbox as well as Playstation this time around

are sticking with an eight core design,

however it will be taking advantage

of the latest Zen 2 core from AMD,

which as we've seen in the PC space with Ryzen,

is incredibly impressive, and especially when you compare it

to the last generation consoles,

which had pretty weak Jaguar CPU cores,

which were essentially mobile chips,

it makes a huge, huge difference.

And in fact we actually did a video

where we built a PC as close to PS5 spec as possible,

and we saw something in the neighborhood

of about a three times performance improvement

going from those old school last generation console CPUs,

to this new generation,

it's gonna be a big leap.

Graphics are where things start

to get a little bit more interesting.

So again, both Sony and Microsoft

are opting to go with AMD Navi GPUs,

which is pretty much what happened last generation,

in that the Xbox One and PS4 had very similar graphics,

just slightly differently configured,

and I expect that to be the case this time around.

So in addition to the Navi GPU core,

we also should see much faster GDDR6 memory.

Now that's what we know officially,

however if we take a little trip into rumor town,

a lot of things are lining up that the PS5,

while it will be significantly

more powerful than the PS4 Pro,

as well as the Xbox One X,

will still be at a power deficit

compared to the Xbox Series X.

And the reason for that is really straightforward,

seems like Microsoft are spending a lot of money,

and a lot of engineering on just simply

brute-forcing their way to a more powerful console.

So we're talking about a larger chip,

as well as higher clock speeds,

and the cooling to support that.

Funnily enough, we actually have more information on this

thanks to Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox,

who recently changed his Twitter profile photo

to be a shot of the chip inside the Series X.

Now while there have been a lot of attempts

to sort of figure out exactly how big it is,

it's kind of hard to tell

since there's no clear reference point in that photo,

but I do think it's a very safe bet to say,

that this will be larger than the Xbox One X chip,

and especially considering that it should be

on the seven nanometer process,

expect a ton of power packed into this guy.

(coughing)

Oh, nicely done,

I think you made that, right?

But there is a wrinkle to all of this,

and that is there actually might be

three next generation consoles, instead of two.

So for over a year now we've heard rumors

about an Xbox Lockhart console.

Now this was something that was a little bit more akin

to say the Xbox One S, versus the One X.

Still the same basic consoles,

still capable of playing the same games,

however with a cheaper price tag,

and with less performance.

So say Series X is aimed at 4K,

this Lockhart, or what I'm gonna call the Series S,

will be aimed at something like 1080p or 1440,

if you're saving a couple hundred dollars,

might be worth it?

Now in conjunction with all the talk about

this Lockhart Series S console,

there are actually quite a few leaked benchmarks,

and some leaked specs,

however I would take all of these

with a massive pile of salt,

- [Ken] Pile of salt?

- Yes, pile of salt.

Not a pinch of salt, not a sprinkling of salt,

you need a pile of salt.

Because some AMD researcher in some lab

loaded up Windows and ran 3DMark does not mean

that's how powerful it is. (laughing)

But pile of salt aside,

what you should I think expect,

if this Lockhart or Series S console

does see the light of day,

is for it to be perfectly powerful,

it's going to be capable of playing

all the same games,

it just won't be playing it at that same resolution,

that same frame rate, that same graphical fidelity.

Now while the Xbox Series X is official,

this supposed Series S is not official yet.

And because of that,

I highly doubt that we will see it come out this year,

so my money would be on the PS5 and the Xbox

coming out later this year,

with the Series X coming out maybe early next year,

just to kind of give a little bit of space on the launch.

Now when it comes to the performance of these consoles,

while yes, both the PS5 and Xbox Series X

will be capable of 8K resolutions,

thanks to their HDMI 2.1 ports,

beyond that, I really don't think

that's going to be the goal,

besides, who actually has an 8K TV at this point?

Realistically, both consoles should be focused

on 4K, 60 frame per second gaming.

Again, Phil Spencer has already gone on record

as saying that's really what they're targeting,

they don't care about the raw pixel count,

rather the frame rate, the fluidity,

and probably most importantly,

the actual graphics that you're delivering.

I mean, seriously,

you can watch a life-like version of,

oh, I don't know,

planet, what is it?

What's planet world?

World planet?

What's the nature doc that everyone loves?

Planet Earth?

You could watch Planet Earth in 720p,

it's gonna look a whole lot more realistic

than "The Witcher" at 4K on an Xbox.

Pixels aren't everything, Marques has been lying to you.

You can watch MKBSD and it'll be just fine.

(siren wailing)

- [Ken] Jesus.

- So along side of that,

some games will likely take advantage of higher frame rates,

so something like 120 frames per second,

and maybe like 1080p might be an option

for more eSports oriented titles.

And both the PS5 and Xbox Series X

will have additional features,

including support for hardware ray tracing,

which will make the lighting much more realistic,

and especially on the audio front,

Sony's really been pushing their,

I think they call it ray tracing for audio,

which is definitely not the correct term,

but something along those lines,

that'll be a much more realistic audio experience.

Another big advantage will be standard SSDs across the board

for this next generation.

Now this is something which will help for several reasons,

first of all, the previous generation consoles,

they had these huge worlds,

but a lot of times they would take

like a minute or two to launch.

However this time around,

we should see significantly cut down load times,

and as a side benefit, some companies,

such as Microsoft, have been touting the fact

that they'll be able to use this SSD

as virtual ram, to give even more memory available

for even bigger, more higher detailed textures and worlds,

and all that kind of stuff.

Ultimately, this generation consoles will be more powerful,

but it won't be a massive leap like we saw

from the Xbox to the Xbox 360, or something.

While yes, we will technically be capable

of high resolutions, really what I expect

are more detailed game worlds,

and sort of smaller, more evolutionary steps.

The bigger difference here is going to be,

of course, in the actual games.

Now I'm curious to see how this shapes up,

because obviously this generation, with the Playstation 4,

Sony has dominated with dedicated

and very sort of embedded studios

have been cranking out great content

that is really exclusive to the Playstation.

And while Xbox has definitely trailed so far,

a few years ago they purchased a ton of major studios

and a lot of those exclusive games

are going to be coming out on the Series X.

Although I will note that Microsoft

has actually said that a lot of the Series X games,

at least at launch and for the first year or two,

will also be coming out on PC and Xbox One,

so you can still probably experience these things,

just not quiet as shiny and new as on the Series X.

- [Ken] Or you get the PC version.

- Or you get the PC version,

which will probably look better than all of them.

The next question is what exactly is new this generation?

Well the easiest place to start

is certainly with the physical designs themselves.

And with the Xbox Series X,

well it's big, it's really big.

Expect it to roughly double the size of the Xbox One X,

if not even a little bit bigger than that,

which makes it less-so a console,

and more-so a small gaming PC,

similar to the one I have right behind me,

very coincidentally.

Now this is necessary because you do need more cooling

for the extra power of the Series X,

but that being said,

get ready to clear some space underneath your TV,

or behind your TV,

or beside your TV,

or on the ground in front of your TV.

Besides the fact that it has an optical drive

and USB port up front,

that's about all we know officially with the Series X,

however a photo of the rear of it got leaked on Twitter,