What do you guys think? It is an interesting topic of discussion. I'd be inclined to agree that GBA to PSP is the largest jump at a glance, but the N-Gage was technically stronger than GBA, though it's debatable whether it counts as a console or not (I think it does). If it counts then the jump between those generations isn't really that big, especially if just looking at GBA to DS and not cross-comparing intergenerational devices by different companies.One question has gotten the retro gaming fandom up in a tizzy, and now the community is trying to decide what the biggest generational leap in gaming history really was.
The question was posed by Obsolete Sony, a Twitter account that specializes in waxing nostalgic about old Sony electronics. This account asked "Can we all agree that the upgrade from the PS2 to the PS3 was the most significant leap in gaming history?" Obviously, the answer is no - both because Twitter can never agree on anything and because suggesting that the leap from PS2 to PS3 was so grand is bordering on nonsense.
Jumping from PS2 to PS3 did give us a lot of things, like easy access to online play, downloadable games, and (marginally) high-definition graphics. But as Digital Foundry's John Linneman notes, there was a big cost: "We went from 60 FPS being the norm to it becoming a rarity. Even 30 FPS solid was uncommon that gen." If you're concerned with performance, the PS3 was a step back. Never mind the fact that the PS3 had a substantially smaller library than its predecessor, and despite its powerful for the time hardware, many multiplatform games ran much better on the competing Xbox 360.
That leaves us with a big question: what actually was the most significant leap in gaming history? Never mind the five PlayStation generations, what about console gens as a whole? If you scroll through the responses to that initial tweet, there are a lot of votes for the move from 16-bit consoles like the SNES and Genesis/Mega Drive into the 3D era, and a fair few arguments that gaming peaked in the PS2 era. (Given the graphical leap from the PS1 to the PS2, that one's pretty strong.)
But there's a dark horse candidate that I've found particularly intriguing: the leap from GBA to PSP. Yes, we're talking about handhelds from two different manufacturers, but these platforms released just four years apart from each other. The GBA offered lovely 2D graphics roughly on par with the SNES, but those visuals were nearly a decade out of date even at the time. The PSP, in contrast, was nearly on par with contemporary consoles.
I don't know whether the pace of technological advancement has truly slowed or whether we're just in an era where games already look so good that it's tough to be wowed anymore, but it's nice to remember a time when new gaming generations genuinely felt like generational shifts. Even if some of those shifts were bigger than others.
Other than those, I think the Genesis to Saturn marked a much bigger jump; Sega went from having arguably the weakest 4th generation console to arguably the strongest 5th generation one. It famously did 2D better than its competition but was also capable of roughly equal 3D development too, albeit with some more difficulty (not due to lacking power but having unorthodox hardware notoriously tough to program for).
Runner up is PS1 to PS2, or if you're cross-comparing, PS1 to Xbox. That's incredibly impressive right there, unlike the jump from PS3 to PS4, or the nigh imperceptible jump from PS4 to PS5.
