The Days of the Mind-Blowing Console Upgrade Are Over
Modern graphics were already great. Without a cutting-edge TV, the PS5 and Xbox Series X may not have much to offer you.
The PlayStation 5 features a GPU capable of providing 10.28 TFLOPs of power, with 36 compute units. The Xbox Series X, meanwhile, pulls down a glorious 12 TFLOPs with 56 compute units.
What in the world does all that mean? If you don’t have a relatively new TV capable of displaying 4K HDR, you might never find out. Unlike in years past, where the leap from a PlayStation 1 to PlayStation 2 or Nintendo 64 to Gamecube meant more polygons, more textures, and more graphical realism, 2020’s new hardware lineup may not dazzle everyone at first glance.
It’s still true that more TFLOPs and faster hardware mean consoles can add more detail. But the details are increasingly smaller or subtler than they were on consoles of the past. In fact, if you’re still using an older HDTV, or even a lower-quality 4K TV, the visual upgrades are barely perceptible on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.
When Metal Gear Solid dropped in 1998 on the original PlayStation, for example, characters had vague shadows for eyes and spoke by shaking their entire heads. Three years later, when Metal Gear Solid 2…
