Sony no longer advertises 8K for their PlayStation 5.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, consumers and observers have noticed that 8K is no longer found in PlayStation 5 packaging.
Video Games Chronicle also pointed out that the slimmer PlayStation 5 still had 8K in its packaging until recently. So this was a more recent change, and in fact it was something that they realized they didn’t want to advertise anymore.
They cited John Linneman of Digital Foundry saying that not only was the PlayStation 5 unsuitable for 8K resolution for video games, but that consumers just don’t want 8K in general.
Of course, it’s just a fact that when new tech gets introduced, it is prohibitively expensive, and it does take years or even decades before it becomes popularized. To put that in context, the first consumer experience of HDTV were Japanese television analog broadcasts in 1988, using Multiple sub-Nyquist Sampling Encoding. It took nearly twenty years later before HD became commonplace, alongside the rise of the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and the Blu-Ray media format.
John happened to cite the one game that could output to 8K on the PlayStation 5, and he knew this very well because he reviewed it for Digital Foundry. Shin’en’s The Touryst can be pushed to output at 7680×4320, and that’s undisputably 8K. It also reflects on Shin’en’s technical capabilities, as this game was originally designed to play optimally on the more modest Nintendo Switch.
But John also pointed out that the PlayStation 5 cannot actually physically output video signals to 7680×4320, since HDMI 2.1 does not support that resolution. So, what The Touryst actually does, after rendering the game in this resolution, is use it to do super-sampling anti-aliasing. And, of course, Shin’en gives players the options to downgrade it down to 4K.
But Shin’en are particularly talented at technical optimization, it’s literally their business outside of video games. A complex title, even something like The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, was highly unlikely to output to 8K on PlayStation 5, since the console doesn’t have the specs to pull it off.
There was also a rumor a few months ago that Sony was making a PlayStation 5 Pro because they had already tapped out all the potential off of the base PlayStation 5. But then, the PlayStation 5 still demonstrates clear performance improvements over the PlayStation 4, so we know it’s a capable machine.
Sony had an incentive to upsell 8K since they sell 8K TVs. Perhaps they had planned to pivot the console to sell their 8K TVs once, but now, it’s clear that that just isn’t going to happen.
