| TheBardsSong said:
The only possible reasons the other two next gen consoles wouldn't be a massive jump over what we have now, is because of development costs or following the Wii's example, but I have no doubt the technology is there. People have said "there isn't any room for improvement over what we have now" 7 generations in a row... and been proven wrong every single time. I think we're going to see the same deal with the eighth generation, at least from the PS4 if nothing else. I fully expect the PS4 to support 4K, though not as a standard. I view it more like how the PS2 and Xbox were capable of HD resolutions, but hardly ever utilized it. I really don't know what direction MS will go, but I have a feeling they're intrigued by Nintendo's direction and will follow them in the next generation. |
Software development costs, hardware manufacturing costs, and heat issues of cutting edge hardware may limit Sony and Microsoft from pushing graphics like they did in the previous generation ...
While I haven't seen any formal studies of it, it seems like the rate of increase of processing power per watt of GPUs has been decreasing for some time; and graphics card manufacturers have (mostly) kept up their previous pace of advancement by allowing their cards to use more energy/produce more heat than earlier cards. Although there are laptop GPUs that can provide 6 to 8 times the performance of the HD consoles with reasonable energy consumption, pushing much beyond that is the domain of desktop GPUs that run very hot (and would likely cause significant problems for a console manufacturer).
