| HoloDust said:
2018? Depends on TSMC. Apparently, they should have 16nm in Q2 2016 (at least according to nVidia), knowing them that will be more like Q4 2016, so their roadmap with 10nm in early 2017 is...well, bit optimistic. But if they have mature 10nm by end of 2017, then maybe 2018 is possible, though I don't think that would make much sense for either MS or Sony, unless MS decides to do what they've done with original Xbox and kill it earlier. As for this gen's jump - when you take how long 7th gen was vs how much of jump we have, both MS and Sony were very stingy. Sony just had to be carefull due to how badly they had it with PS3 and MS being specially missguided by their Kinect/TV policies. Otherwise, we would see (at least MS) what EPIC asked of them, which is around full blown 7870 with 2.5TFLOPS - that case with proper cooling most certainly can handle that GPU, price would probaly be same as or slightly higher than PS4 (since they're willing to lose initially on console), and I think their sales (at least in US and UK) would be much better then they are now. So, no, I don't think 5-6x is resonable estimate (specially given how this gen was already underpowered, some more, some less, from the start, and how much bad press they have for it), just like I didn't think (along with few other people around here) that was reasonable estimate for 7th to 8th jump either. And while I doubt they will go for native 4K (since they would then really have to wait for 7nm and 20+ TFLOPS GPUs), going with 2560x1440 (or 2880x1620, which would be 720p to 1080p equivalent) would give them a lot of headache with upscaling and some bad press, so I think they will opt for anamorphic and/or temporal 2160p which will give better image quality with similar pixel count. But for that, they need at least PS3 to PS4 jump. |
Well my 2018 estimate depends greatly on when Nintendo releases their next console (which is looking to be late 2017.) It also depends on the capabilities of the PS4/XBO. By late 2017 4k display adoption rates should be quite big - enough to justify new consoles releasing in late 2018. As you said, this generation was relatively underpowered from the start. They're going to want to upgrade sooner rather than later to satisfy developers and third parties.
Even if we consider that MS and Sony gimped their consoles for other reasons (if the cost is truly miniscule I don't believe Sony wouldn't have gone for a 7870), a 7870 would only mean a flop increase of 10 times, although it definitely would've given 1080p gameplay with a consistent 30fps. This is still much less than the preceding generation difference. I'm suspicious though of how cheap it would've been to go with a 7870. It seems to me that the additional cost would be between $50-100 (considering the retail price differences were double for a time after peak hardware development) and I'm unsure if that price difference could be reconciled with the XBO matching PS4 prices. It's not like these consoles are selling for a profit in their current form.
Well we were talking about floating points. The PS3 was rated at ~230 gflops and the PS4 at ~1,800 gflops. That is a difference of 7.8. If the real-world difference is about ten times that, it is likely because of fewer memory bottlenecks and advance feature-sets. The same could apply to the PS5/XBTWO vs. PS4/XBO. The trend has been, with each geneneration, smaller increases in raw power/same price. This is especially evident when we consider how long last generation was. I just can't see the difference being much larger than 7th -> 8th generation, even if one of the manufacturers tried to outpower the other. I also don't see MS/SONY repeating the seventh generation power struggle. That was bad pretty much for both of them and third parties.
Either way, I don't see native 4k being a thing next-generation (although I do think they'll try to promise it.)
