Developers have had 3D development kits since january

[Squilliam]

disolitude said:

Squilliam said:

Entry level price? Between $249 and $299.

Also it'd be cheaper for developers to make games in 3D than it would be to expend the effort making even more high fidelity assets for the next generation. One or two programmers are a lot cheaper than a team of 20-30 artists!

The reason? The next generation GPUs/CPUs are both more efficient and powerful for the same number of transistors given a limited power budget and the console manufacturers have easily got at least three times as many to play with. Not only will the next generation hardware be more powerful, it will also be more efficient and it will be able to reuse many of the products of the left eye render for the right eye as they happen at identical frame-time. This efficiency is a hardware level feature which is only present in DX11+ GPUs.

I don't know if I agree with the whole efficiency aspect. I mean the GTX 480 which just came out pushes the boundaries with whats physically possible with video cards given the specifications for PCI-E slot. If we look at the history, these video cards are getting bigger, hotter and consume more and more power.

I personally think we may see the first dual GPU console next gen...and a 1000 watt power supply built in the X720 :)

You have to remember that the current chips are 300M transistors, both the Xbox 360 and PS3 respectively. A modern GPU would be like the Xenos is to the RSX except it would likely have at least 4* the number of transistors. The Juniper GPUs from ATI are 170mm^2 and almost a billion transistors and they have about 5* the rated shader performance. On 28NM which is coming in 2011 they could fit 1.5B transistors into a space not much larger than the current Xenos die size.

You have to remember that the consoles are far more efficient in terms of how they use their resources and they don't have to use rediculous levels of AA and they can implement more efficient software techniques. A humble Juniper class GPU could match what the top of the range Nvidia chip can achieve if fitted to a console.