Just three years separated the release of the original PlayStation 4 in November 2013 and the PS4 Pro in November 2016. Microsoft has moved a little slower—four years between the Xbox One and Xbox One X this autumn—but that's still pretty quick in the world of consoles, especially if you factor in the slim refreshes that appeared last year. As a reminder, there were seven years between the PS3 and PS4, and eight years between the Xbox 360 and One.

While the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X have substantially different innards from their predecessors, they can still run all of the same games, but usually at a lower resolution and with a few graphics toggles switched off. With previous console iterations this wasn't usually possible—a new console meant entirely new CPU, RAM, storage—unless the console maker went through the pain of including backwards compatibility.

Now, though, the PlayStation and Xbox have finally ascended to x86—the one true architecture—and they're reaping the benefits of a standardised, genericised, well-supported environment with lots of competitive players. There are still some hardware differences between these consoles and your desktop PC, but they're relatively minor. If Microsoft or Sony want to boost their consoles' performance, they simply buy a faster or larger x86-64 CPU from AMD or Intel. Ditto the graphics chip: just go and ask Nvidia or AMD for something with more cores, then slot it in.

This is a gross simplification, but it is essentially what Microsoft and Sony did with the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro. For a relatively small investment (new industrial design, new logic board, some other small tweaks) they now have new, significantly differentiated products that can be sold at higher price points.

And they will do it again a few years from now. Everything will shuffle down the product stack: the Xbox One S will be a little cheaper; the Xbox One X will drop down to the £250/$300 price point currently occupied by the Xbox One S; and then there'll be a new more powerful console at the top end, the xXbox One Xx.

I could be wrong; maybe Microsoft or Sony will go down another path eventually. But it seems unlikely, now that they've found themselves in the mid-range x86 sweet spot. It would be like Intel or AMD switching from x86-64 to a brand new architecture called Bitanium, because Bitanium is technically better than x86—but that would never happen because the x86 ecosystem is just so damn mature. A more likely scenario would be the console makers, perhaps in partnership with the chip makers, developing specialist extensions like SSE2 or AVX.





















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Such a massive change to the console industry will have massive repercussions—though it's hard to predict what they might be. There are too many variables. How will consumers react to a new console being released every three years? (The PS4 Pro seems to be doing okay so far.) How will Sony, Microsoft, and games developers handle the widening performance gap between new and old consoles? Will there always a shiny technological curio (4K, HDR) to push consumers towards a more expensive device?

And what about PC gaming? PC gaming has enjoyed a period of growth over the last few years, mostly off the back of big free-to-play games like Dota 2 and League of Legends, plus the general expansion of the industry and the number of top-notch games. But what will happen as games consoles become more powerful?

In an interview last year, the head of Sony Interactive Entertainment Andrew House said the PS4 Pro was primarily designed to win over PC gamers, rather than to drive the knife further into Microsoft. "I saw some data that really influenced me,” House said. “It suggested that there’s a dip mid-console lifecycle where the players who want the very best graphical experience will start to migrate to PC, because that’s obviously where it’s to be had. We wanted to keep those people within our eco-system by giving them the very best and very highest [performance quality]."

Microsoft has quite different intentions than Sony—it also wins if people buy Windows PCs for gaming—but the net result is much the same: a couple of years from now, Sony will probably release a console capable of true 4K @ 60 FPS across a range of games for £450/$500.

For many PC gamers it's about much more than just graphics quality, and they won't be moved by a cheap 4K games console. But next year, when I look at building a 4K-capable gaming rig or a friend asks me for some 4K buying advice, and I add up the cost of the components and arrive at a figure north of £1,000... well, that decision is going to be a lot trickier than I ever thought it would be.

This article's headline has been modified since publication.