Marketing is one of the most important resources that companies have when trying to convince us to buy their product, and it is quite common that some devices offer a series of features that seek to attract attention, even if they are not true. In the case of the latest generation of consoles of both Sony (PS5) as Xbox (Series X/S), it was stated from the start that both would allow resolutions of up to 8Kbut neither can reasonably offer this quality.
In recent years it has become very common, both in the video game industry and in the hardware industry, to exaggerate the specifications of each product, this is something that we have seen with several games presented as “the gaming revolution”. game“, as well as the consoles that came to “end the PC era”. As we have well indicated, this is something quite common for companies when it comes to marketing, but there are moments where they have to end up admitting that the statements they made weren’t real, as is the case with this generation’s consoles.
The technical limitations of the PS5 prevent its use in 8K
In all the attempts they made Sony as Xbox To see that their product surpassed that of their rival, there was one that aroused the curiosity of many people, and that was the fact that they indicated that their consoles were capable of offering a gaming experience in 8K. As you would expect, this is something that really ended up being wrong, since in general none of the consoles, neither Sony nor Xbox, were really created to offer this type of resolution, but the Xbox Series can offer it.
And one of the main problems of the PS5 is the HDMI output that it integrates, since from the beginning it did not have bus speed to offer 8K, since it is limited to 32 gigabits per second it does not would therefore not be able to offer this resolution at the promised 60 FPS. And to have 8K at 60 FPS, a minimum of 49.65 Gbit/s would be required, but this is obviously not the only limitation it has, since on the other hand HDR can never be activated at 8K resolution, since it requires 10 bits per channel, compared to 8 bits per channel offered by the PlayStation 5.
Although it may seem strange, the Xbox Series X could use 8K unlike the Sony console
Before we get into the technical details of why the Xbox Series obviously implies that even if we want to try gaming in 8K on either console, making the necessary changes they wouldn’t really able to offer 8K because they literally aren’t ready to enable it.
Now let’s move on to the technical details of the series. It could be played this way if enabled. In any case, both consoles could technically offer 8K if chroma subsampling is enabled, a technology used to reduce bandwidth costs by reducing the resolution of specific color channels, with the difference that on PS5 it could only offer basic 8K while in Series X we could also activate HDR.
