By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
curl-6 on 03 November 2013
Edit Thread
torok said:
curl-6 said:
Visual leaps between generations have been diminishing for a long time now.

The 5th to 6th gen leap was smaller than the 4th to 5th.

The 6th to 7th gen leap was smaller than the 5th to 6th.

The 7th to 8th gen leap is smaller than the 6th to 7th.


I would say that 6th to 7th gen leap was bigger than 5th to 6th, since it marked the use o programmable GPUs vs. fixed function ones. Lightning on PS2 and PS1 is basically very similar, while PS3 has all the advantages of a shader capable GPU to render more realistic lightning. The jump on models and textures was bigger on PS1 to PS2, but lightning has the hability to grab much more attention than these two. Fixed function GPU games have terrible lightning compared to modern ones. We will probably see a massive leap with the 9th gen when they start to use ray tracing capable hardware and all 8th gen games will start to look really, really bad.

(I've used PS consoles as a reference, but the same can be said about Xbox 360 and Wii U compared with their fixed function GPU powered antecessors).

About the leap, is to soon to judge. When X360 came, people hurried to call it Xbox 1.5 and they were wrong. Resistance: FM looks like crap compared with Killzone 3 as GTA IV is horrible side by side with GTA V. So we can assume that Killzone Shadow Fall and Ryse will look like crap in 3 to 4 years compared with newer games.

Fixed function to programmable shaders were indeed big leap, but I'd say the gargantuan improvements in models, textures, and the kind of worlds and scenarios you could create on 6th gen platforms versus the 5th still edged out the 6th to 7th upgrade.

Of course, PS4 and Xbone will improve visually with time, like any platform, but I do not think the increase will be as dramatic as last gen; PS3 was very hard to develop for, so it took devs ages to tap its full power, but PS4 is said to be very easy.