Sony has made a subtle but significant change to the packaging of its PlayStation 5 consoles. As you can see from the tweet below, Sony has removed all mention of 8K support from the PS5 box art. Despite claims on the original PS5 packaging, this futuristic feature has never actually been supported, and seemingly never will be on standard PlayStation 5 models. 8K support was supposed to come to the PS5 after launch, but the update never materialised. Indeed, the only PS5 game to support 8K is The Touryst. However, while the action-adventure game renders at 8K internally, it downscales to 4K when running on the PS5.
While it’s not an ideal scenario and some fans rightfully feel like they’ve been misled, the reality is that 8K TV sets aren’t actually that popular.
In the current climate, 8K television sets are seen as a bit of a waste of money, primarily due to the lack of content available.
Even if more video games were developed with 8K support, file sizes would likely be huge, and frame-rates would take a massive hit on current hardware.
Most non-indie games struggle to run consistently at 60 or 120 frames-per-second in 4K on the PS5, especially when you start factoring in special effects like ray-tracing.
Hopefully the heavily rumoured PS5 Pro will provide a more consistent balance between performance and resolution, although I can’t imagine 8K support will be a priority.
The upgraded PS5 is expected to launch this holiday season, following an official reveal at some point this summer.
According to reports, the PS5 Pro CPU will be the same as the current model, but will have a mode that can increase performance by around 10%.
“Trinity has a mode that targets 3.85GHz CPU frequency,” reads a report on The Verge. “Sony will offer developers the ability to pick between a ‘standard mode’ at 3.5GHz or the ‘high CPU frequency mode’ at 3.85GHz.”
Finally, developers will have access to more system memory with the PS5 Pro, which should make it easier to improve resolutions and increase frame-rates.
Games that deliver significant improvements will reportedly ship with a PS5 Pro Enhanced tag to make it easier for the customer to identify titles that utilise the console’s superior architecture.