Summary
- Shuhei Yoshida, former head of Sony, claims that the PlayStation 5 has reached its peak and graphical advances have stagnated.
- However, the executive states that the PS5 is an “incredible” system and, together with the SSD, it made almost “all games better”.
- Rumors indicate that the PlayStation 6, scheduled for 2028, will focus on efficiency and new AI technologies.
For Shuhei Yoshida, former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, the current generation of PlayStation has reached a kind of technological plateau. While appearing on the podcast Friends Per SecondYoshida commented that it is difficult to recognize visual advances in current generation games.
“The graphics have reached a level where even I can’t differentiate between some features, like ray tracing, unless it’s side by side or at a higher frame rate,” he said. The executive suggested that the PlayStation may have reached its peak in graphics power.
“They can’t do the same”
In the podcast, Yoshida suggests that Sony avoid repeating the recipe used in previous cycles: “Clearly they can’t do what they’ve been doing, which is increasing graphics power to provide a cutting-edge experience.”
However, he states that the “PS5 is an incredible system in terms of quality of experience”, and remembers that the “adoption of the SSD was almost a miracle”. “I think the PS5 and the SSD made almost all games better”, he points out.
Shuhei Yoshida left Sony in January after working for the company for more than three decades. For years, he was a central figure in the development of exclusive PlayStation games until he was transferred to the indie section, where he ended his career at the company.
It is worth remembering that, according to Sony itself, the PlayStation 5 is the most profitable generation in history. The current cycle has surpassed all previous generations in revenue and, since 2020, the console has already generated US$136 billion.
Will PlayStation 6 be better than PS5 Pro?
PlayStation design consultant Mark Cerny and AMD senior vice president Jack Huynh appeared in an official video nearly two weeks ago to comment on Project Amethyst — a collaboration focused on “machine learning-based technology for graphics and gameplay.”
Cerny confirmed that the news “only exists in simulation at the moment”, but that the “results are quite promising”. He linked the project to new hardware, possibly the PlayStation 6, saying he is “very excited to bring them to a future console in a few years.”
The statements arrive in parallel with leaks about Sony’s new console. Rumors indicate that the PS6 will arrive in 2028, with a focus on efficiency and new technologies based on artificial intelligence, leaving raw graphics power in the background.
In August 2025, the YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead (MLID) even released information about the new generation of the console. The content, according to the channel, would be from an internal presentation by AMD itself made in 2023.
The leak suggests that the PS6 will be more powerful than the PS5 Pro and will have a “heavy emphasis on cost constraints”. We tested the Pro a few months ago and came to the conclusion that the upgrade was not warranted.
The new objective would be to keep the console’s price close to that of the base PS5 at launch. The material also details the console’s supposed chipset: a customized APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) from AMD, with a Navi 5 chiplet. It would have 40 to 48 RDNA 5 Compute Units, operating at around 3 GHz, and potentially 8 Zen 6 processor cores. The TBP (Total Base Power) of the chip would be 160 W, much more efficient in terms of power than the PS5 Pro’s Zen 2 chip.
According to rumors, the overall performance of the PS6 could be three times greater than that of the original PS5, with substantial gains in ray tracing. Final performance would also depend on AI upscaling techniques such as PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) to optimize frame rates, aiming to achieve 4K at 120 fps consistently.
With information from Games Radar
Source: https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/playstation-5-atingiu-o-auge-e-avanco-grafico-estagnou-diz-ex-chefe-da-sony/
