BlueFalcon said:
I think console gamers will soon realize their expectations are not aligned with reality regarding how graphics evolution works and how hardware and graphics evolved in the past. Think of it as a track athlete: learning to walk from childhood, then to run, then to compete in high school, college level, national level and Olympic level. The early stages are easier to conquer and later it becomes ever so more difficult until every 1 hundreds of a second separates thousands of pro track athletes in the world. The next revolution in graphics requires such exponential increases in hardware performance, it's well outside the realm of PS4/Xbox 720 or Wii U -- this is not coming from me, but from the leading game developers in the world. I suggest people go on Youtube and find "Unreal Engine 3: Official Samaritan Demo": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSXyztq_0uM Now ask yourselves, does Samaritan Unreal Engine 3 look next generation to you? That's the BEST next generation consoles will be able to do. The Samaritan demo needs 10x the power of Xbox 360 and its graphics are not THAT revolutionary compared to today's best looking games: "Last week Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney told DICE 2012 attendees that the tech demo of Unreal Engine 3 released last year, called "Samaritan," required 2.5 terraFLOPS to run at a 1920 x 1080 resolution, 30 frames per second and with 48 operations per pixel (that rig was a monster in size too). By comparison, Microsoft's Xbox 360 console is only capable of 0.25 terraFLOPS, meaning Microsoft will need to generate a new console at least ten times more powerful in order to run the UE3 demo smoothly.
Sweeney estimated during DICE 2012 that a complete approximation of "perfect" visual quality requires computing power of around 2,000 times greater than today's hardware. A "good enough" approximation of visual reality is 5,000 teraFLOPS, or 5,000 trillion floating point operations per second. Looks like consoles have a long way to go before they reach the "good enough" state, if that even happens." http://www.tomshardware.com/news/UE3-UE4-Samaritan-Tim-Sweeney-Mark-Rein,14698.html There you have it - to just move beyond this generation marginally, we need hardware 10x more powerful than Xbox 360 and for truly visually impressive graphics, 20,000x the power of Xbox 360, or 2,000x more powerful than today's PCs. Just to create 1 next generation game character on screen in real life with real-time generated hair and somewhat realistic skin requires $1,000 of modern GPUs.
Sure, this looks nice but probably won't have a WOW factor like going from PS1 to PS2 to PS3 was. I also don't think PS4 will even reach this level above because to get there, you need 2x GTX680s or about 22-24x the power of PS3's GPU and this is just 1 such character on screen not 10 or 20 like in Assassin's Creed. There is no way PS4 will have 2x GTX680s under the hood so what you see above is likely well beyond PS4/Xbox 720/Wii U to begin with. For this very reason, imo the mind-blowing graphical increases from 1 generation to the next are behind us forever. The first time we went from 2D to 3D and from 3D to complex lighting, shadows and shader effects was mind-blowing. From here on out, it's like climbing Mount Everest with baby steps. Thus, as long as next generation games run at full 1080P with anti-aliasing and DX11 effects, I am focusing on the gameplay and quality of exclusive titles. If Sony delivers in this area, it won't need to be the most powerful console to be worth purchasing :) I have a feeling a lot of gamers are already pretty happy with PS3's graphics today. Moving to native 1080P at 60 fps would be a nice improvement. The keys to PS4's success will be its exclusives and price point. As noted in this thread, PS1 and PS2 were not the most powerful consoles in their respective generations but proved widely popular due to their games. |
Interesting post
I can definitely settle with Samaritan demo graphics :)
