| Potable_Toe said: I think people are highly pessimistic in how much performance, and thus graphics along with other features, will be upgraded over this generation... truth be told there are many areas for graphics to improve upon over todays yardsticks. We will be seeing much more in the way of model details (Parallax Mapping/Tesselation enhancements etc...); Texture Resolution/detail and Lighting effects, if the console's come out in 2014 or later we could be lucky and see 'Ray-Tracing' in games. Plus other things such as massive amounts of FSAA & MSAA (360 can do 4x max and the PS3 can't do AA at all) and Volumetric items (Smoke/Water etc...). Assuming the next Xbox and Play Station are released in the 2014/15 period we could be seeing consoles as much as 12 - 24 times as powerful as the 360/PS3 at around $250-$400 to produce mark from which we might expect retail prices to be $300 - $450 at launch either being sold for a small profit or breaking even, rather than having to sell at a massive loss in order to gain some ground and an acceptable pricepoint. Another massive focus will be on making the systems as easy as possible to work with and develop for which will help to see a quality boost without increasing production costs to inhibitive levels.
... I was originally going to simply write "About this much" but that didn't end up happening :( |
Great post.
And most people don't realize that in the long run stuff such as sophisticated mapping techniques, tesselation, polygon-counts, lighting, physics, surface and volumetric technology etc will mean much more for future graphics than screen resolution, framerate and anti-aliasing which are the features everyone argues about in this gen.
And the big dream is of course ray-tracing...
Next console gen will look so good. I am convinced it will look even better than the wonderful UE3 Samaritan demo:
