Phil Spencer: We're years away from 8K being a console gaming standard

Microsoft's Phil Spencer delivers a grounded message about 8K gaming on the Series X, saying that it won't be a standard for console games for quite some time.

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8K gaming takes and absolutely ridiculous amount of power. Technically it's possible, and our massive NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 review shows just how demanding gaming actually is--it chews through VRAM and processing power like it's nothing. The world's most powerful dedicated GPU can belt out 8K games at playable FPS, but shines with DLSS on.

The Series X's 12TFLOP GPU is powerful, but it doesn't come close to the RTX 3090. There's very little hope in 8K gaming being feasible on the console; if anything, expect to watch films at 8K resolution. In-game frame rates on 8K displays might dip tremendously and be complemented by big resolution upscaling to match. Thankfully, Microsoft knows 8K is a long ways away for consoles, and Phil Spencer tells consumers and gamers not to expect anything crazy from the next-gen Xbox on 8K TVs.

In fact, Spencer thinks higher refresh rates is a more noticable enhancement and improvement.

"I think 8K is aspirational technology. The display capabilities of devices are not really there yet. I think we're years away from 8K being-if it ever is-standard in video games," Spencer told Wired.

The Xbox Series X releases November 10, 2020 for $499. Check below for a complete side-by-side of the 9th console generation:

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