Sony could lower the price of the PlayStation 6 by making it less powerful

While Sony is raising prices for the PlayStation 5, recent leaks – take with a grain of salt – suggest that the price increase may not be passed on to the PlayStation 6. Consumers may actually see the opposite happening, where the PS6 achieves a lower or equal price by sacrificing some of its raw power. Sony executives said during an earnings conference call that they haven’t settled on a definitive launch date for the next console, so nothing is set in stone.

However, it is likely that the memory shortage will not be resolved by the time the next-gen console launches, and the best way to reduce prices would be to reduce some of the hardware, reducing the memory bus and total video RAM. Before anyone gets excited, 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. While previous leaks suggested the PS6 would have a 30GB RAM configuration, the news suggests it could be reduced to 24GB VRAM with a 128-bit memory bus to keep costs more reasonable.

KeplerL2 claims that these changes “would represent a $60 reduction in bill of materials”, without any significant change in the price of GDDR7 memory, and would provide “an increase in SoC yield by being able to harvest defects from the MC (memory controller)”. Apparently no modifications to the APU would be necessary to achieve this; simply “disabling a memory controller” would provide the necessary results.

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

But with no official launch mentioned, despite plenty of speculation floating around, no one really knows when the PlayStation 6 will hit stores. Experts have guessed between 2027, which seems unlikely, until 2028 or until 2030. Anyone looking to upgrade soon will probably end up disappointed, but there are still plenty of ways to get the most out of your PlayStation 5 before that happens. You can also improve your PS5’s performance with a few settings tweaks, if you’re playing one of the latest titles.