Sony has been talking about 8K gaming since 2019. Half a decade later, the newly released PS5 Pro is finally ready to make all that talk a reality Unfortunately, Sony achieved this by cutting some corners. This adds to the growing list of reasons why 8K gaming is unlikely to gain traction anytime soon, especially on consoles.
Sony’s sacrifices for the PS5 Pro’s 8K mode
While the original PS5 was initially advertised as compatible with 8K TVs, its output resolution remains capped at 4K to this date. Meanwhile, the PS5 Pro offers 8K output out of the box, but in an unexpected way.
The main issue preventing the PS5 from doing 8K was its 32Gbps HDMI controller, which requires compromises even at lower resolutions.
To get 4K at 120Hz, the console uses a compression method called chroma subsampling which lowers the amount of color information. This method sacrifices image quality, as the 4:2:2 subsampling used by the PS5 merges color information for adjacent pixels along the horizontal axis.
8K effectively requires double the bandwidth of 4K at 120Hz, making it extremely resource-intensive. However, the PS5 Pro’s HDMI controller comes with the same 32Gbps limitation as its PS5 counterpart. For reference, even just doing 8K at 60Hz normally requires 48Gbps.
How the PS5 Pro delivers 8K despite its bandwidth limitations
The way Sony managed to deliver 8K output regardless was by adding support for Display Stream Compression (DSC) to the Pro model. This software solution effectively side-stepped the 32Gbps bottleneck, allowing the PS5 Pro to do 8K at 60Hz by lowering the bandwidth demands of its video output signal.
The main benefit of DSC is that it’s perceptually lossless, so the PS5 Pro can (usually) deliver an 8K image without messing with its color fidelity, like it does when outputting 4K at 120Hz.
But by pushing the limits of the console’s HDMI controller rather than increasing them, Sony made the PS5 Pro less future-proof. In fact, it arguably made it less present-proof as well, as 8K 120Hz TVs already exist.
Another drawback to DSC is that it complicates the requirements for 8K gaming. Although many 8K TVs support this feature, not all do, and determining compatibility can be tricky.
The catch with Sony’s 8K shortcut
If the PS5 Pro could output an uncompressed 4320p image, it would work with any 8K monitor or TV. But because it relies on software tricks to compensate for Sony cutting hardware corners, you need to be extra sure that your display can process its specific type of 8K signal.
You can also forget about recording 8K footage because even professional-grade 8K capture cards don’t support DSC as of late 2024. Sony’s technology of choice comes with some other minor issues as well. For instance, while DSC is perceptually lossless, certain edge cases can still result in image artifacts.
Additionally, although the algorithm is optimized for low latency, adding any form of compression could introduce slight delays, especially at ultra-high resolutions. That’s hardly something you’d notice while watching a movie, but even just a hypothetical delay is far from ideal for gaming.
The market is moving away from 8K
Had the PS5 Pro launched four years ago, it would have been reasonable to assume that TVs would eventually catch up to its feature set. However, as the technical experts at Digital Foundry recently observed, fewer new 8K displays are being released in 2024 compared to 2020.
The novelty of 8K appears to be fading, as 4320p panels remain prohibitively expensive to produce, with the market now shifting focus to 4K displays with high refresh rates.
This trend is further driven by the fact that most people simply can’t tell the difference between 4K and 8K on screens smaller than 100 inches. For reference, that’s large enough that you can have Shaq wearing a top hat lay on top if it and not spill over the edges.
The difference becomes even harder to discern when you’re not looking at native 8K, but an image upsampled from 4K or an even lower resolution. This is how F1 24 achieves 8K on the PS5 Pro, and it’s likely how the vast majority of games will support it in the future.
To date, only two other titles have been confirmed to support 8K on Sony’s newest console: Gran Turismo 7 and No Man’s Sky.
Neither runs natively in 8K, with No Man’s Sky being capped at 30fps in this mode, despite upscaling from around 2700p. GT7 manages 60fps at 8K, but in doing so, it sacrifices ray tracing—a feature far more noticeable than the difference between 2560p and 4320p.
Don’t hold your breath for 8K (console) gaming
The compromises required for 8K gaming on the PS5 Pro ultimately come down to one thing: hardware limitations. Not just in terms of its lackluster HDMI controller bandwidth, but also in the sense of the console just not being powerful enough to handle this whole shebang.
Truly 8K-capable gaming PCs start at around $5,000. It’s simply unreasonable to expect a $700 console to come anywhere near their performance. So, although Sony definitely cut corners with the PS5 Pro’s 8K support, it’s impressive it was able to offer anything of the sort at all.
Technical achievements aside, don’t hold your breath for 8K gaming to take off in the console space anytime soon. It’s unlikely to happen during this hardware generation, and given the current trends in the TV market, it might not even become a reality in the PS6 era.
Sony seems to recognize this shift, as it has recently given up advertising any PS5 model as an 8K device despite finally delivering a console that can actually (kind of) deliver on its five-year-old promise of 4320p gaming.
