So Microsoft & Sony are talking big about their new consoles and bringing high refresh rate gaming to their new machines.
This will not happen.
Why? Because Xbox's and PS5's main market are living room consoles. They are connected to TV's, and there are very, very, very few TV's on the market that can output at greater than 60Hz.
To suggest MS & Sony will make a serious effort to support 120Hz as a standard for their games is a little ludicrous. They will make 4K a standard (which I expect to get breached halfway through the generation, set a remind me if you don't believe me) and try to target 60Hz, though 30 will become the baseline once again for the usual 3rd person games etc.
So where's the argument for this? How about an analogy:
Let's say the new consoles are coming out and will support 3D TV as a flagship feature. All games must be developed with support for 3D TV's and thus the developers need to expend time & money to fulfil this requirement. This report shows that in England, the maximum number of 3D TV's sold in any given year was 10%, but most of the time it was less than that. We can assume then that of 1080p TV households, 3D TV's occupy between 2-6% of market share. So why would MS & Sony want to focus on this?
Take that same logic and apply it to High-refresh gaming. Typically, the only consumer level displays that support this are 1440p 144Hz monitors, which top out around 32". These also require external speakers, don't have a TV remote or other TV features, so are insufficient for living room purposes.
It's not going to happen. Xbox Series X and PS5 games will not support 120Hz as a base standard. You will get the possibility to run indie games etc at this refresh, but you won't see the new God of War at 120Hz, or the new Halo, or Forza etc.
Developers aren't going to create lower-poly assets, disable ray-tracing, gimp textures, remove dynamic lighting etc all to appease a fraction of a percentage of people who have the ability to see 120Hz on their display.
EDIT: All this and I forgot to write even the mechanics of it. 4K is 4x the resolution of 1080p, and 120Hz is 4x the framerate of 30FPS.
That means the GPU needs to be 16x as powerful just to display an image with the exact same fidelity as current gen.
Come on guys.
