Shadow1980 said:
I assume you're talking about diminishing returns. While this generation doesn't seem as big of a jump as that from the sixth to seventh generations, which in turn wasn't quite as pronounced as that from the fifth to the sixth, I've been quite surprised by some of what I've seen. Going back and playing some old 360 games, especially earlier ones, and then playing something like Driveclub, The Order, or Battlefront, or just seeing the footage for Uncharted 4, and I'm amazed by how much better things can look this generation when the hardware is properly leveraged. I knew at least one or two people who thought that last generation was going to be the last because there was no possible way games could look any better, yet here we are. There's still much than can be done to advance the boundaries of what games can do both graphically and in other areas. Better and more realistic lighting and animation, more sophisticated physics, better AI, better level-of-detail techniques to reduce or eliminate conspicuous "pop-in," and doing all these things at a stable framerate (likely a 60fps target given increasing demand among console gamers for said framerate) and perhaps even at a native 4K resolution. It's going to take very substantial leaps in computing power for "diminishing returns" to get to the point where there simply isn't anything more they can do to make things look any better. If the rumored specs on the Neo are true, then it's really nothing more than the exact same core components as the base PS4, just souped-up (~30% increased to CPU clock speed, ~24% increase to RAM speed, and a boosted GPU of the same model). The most that's going to do is offer faster and/or stabler framerates without sacrificing visual details and with the ability to have everything run at a native 1080p. A nice improvement to be sure, but not generational. While that might entice quite a few people, I have serious doubts that it or future upgrades are enough to sustain healthy PS4 sales indefinitely. In fact, I doubt they'll be able to keep this generation of PlayStation lasting any longer than the previous. Also, there's still tons of room for true generational shifts in console power, and we're not going to get that with a PS4 Neo or PS4 Trinity or whatever. Eventually, Sony is going to have to release the PlayStation 5. |
But it's not that surprising the graphics improved enough (especially first generation titles), considering that the 7 years from PS3 to PS4 is still really a very long period in electronic, we switched from specific and hard to optimize architecture to easy to develop PC architecture, and for the first time we got away from memory constrained hardware (x16, on par with PC). The diminishing return rate will only increase, and I believe there is no big hardware revolution to come for the next generation. In this context, I believe the PS4.5 (and any hardware with similar specs) could make this generation last for a very long time. It's not a prediction but an example of such scenario, if a (true) new generation of XBox/Nintendo launches in the next 2 years and last 5 years, that means the PS4.5 will not face a significantly better hardware for the next 7 years, making the PS4 last 10 years overall.
