Sony Might Lower The PlayStation 6's Price By Making It Less Powerful

While Sony is raising prices for the PlayStation 5, recent leaks — you should take leaks with a grain of salt — suggest that the price hike may not carry over to the PlayStation 6. Consumers might actually see the opposite happen, where the PS6 achieves a lower or equal price by sacrificing some of its raw power. Sony executives shared on an earnings call that they haven't chosen a definitive launch date for the next console, so nothing is set in stone.

However, it's likely the memory shortage won't be ironed out by the time the next-gen console launches, and the best way to cut prices would be to reduce some of the hardware, lowering the memory bus and total video ram. Before anyone gets all fired up, this information was discussed by an AMD leaker named KeplerL2 on the Neogaf forums, and no official details have been shared or discussed publicly by Sony. Where previous leaks suggested the PS6 would have a 30GB RAM configuration, the new ones suggest that it might lower to 24GB of VRAM with a memory bus of 128 bits to keep the costs more reasonable.

KeplerL2 says making these changes "would be a $60 BOM reduction," without any significant GDDR7 memory price changes, and would provide "a yield boost for the SoC by being able to harvest MC (memory controller) defects." Apparently, no APU changes would be necessary to achieve this; merely "disabling one memory controller" would provide the necessary results.

Yes, the lower memory bus would reduce the potential performance and bandwidth ceiling of the new console, but it would ultimately make costs cheaper. The PlayStation 5 uses a 256-bit memory bus with 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM. The result of the proposed changes for the PS6 simply means it won't deliver a huge generational leap in graphics and processing power compared to the previous generation. But it would still provide a performance boost even over the PlayStation 5 Pro, which has the same VRAM and memory bus specs, but an additional 2GB of DDR5 RAM for the OS, allowing games to use more of the main memory.

But with no official launch mentioned, albeit with lots of speculation floating around, nobody really knows when the PlayStation 6 is going to hit stores. Experts have guessed anywhere from 2027, which is not looking likely, to 2028 or as far as 2030. Anyone looking to upgrade soon will most likely end up disappointed, but there are still plenty of ways to get the most out of your PlayStation 5 before that happens. You could also boost your PS5's performance with a few settings tweaks, if you're playing one of the latest titles.