AMD Sea Islands aka 8000 series GPUs will be featured in next generation consoles

[Crono141]

HoloDust said:

Crono141 said:

HappySqurriel said:

The problem (of course) is that producing content for games with that level of detail will be very expensive ... and the new problem will be creating procedural content to make game development affordable.

This.  Games will hit a financial wall long before we'll hit a technical one in regards to simulating real world physics and visuals.

Not necessarily - lot of that increase in production costs has already happened in this generation. If you watched UE4 presentation you could've noticed that one of its main advantages over UE3 is not just improved graphics capabilites, but actually tools and workflow, which allows artist to achieve desired results much faster than today (e.g., global lights don't have to be prebaked anymore). That's why I think development cost increase in this next gen won't be as steep as it was the case in this gen.

As CPUs/GPUs advance I can see more of this trend - e.g., we have lower poly models, tesselation and all the maps (displacement, normal, specular, diffuse...) approach now because current hardware can't deal with original models that artist made in 3DMax/Maya/ZBrush - in some (relatively near or distant) future those models will be just dropped into game editor without need to make all of those steps. Practically, developer will be removing one part of worflow (thus cutting cost) cause hardware will be powerfull enough to handle the original art. Not that I think that production budgets won't grow - they will, but I think that once we hit certain tech level that money will be spent for improvments in other fields.

I see what you're saying, but making a bump map is far quicker and cheaper than creating a 3D model with all those bumps actually on it.