zarx said:
HappySqurriel said:
First off, what is meant by 50% or 100% more powerful? Are we talking about a perceived increase in processing power or an actual increase in processing power? If it is actual processing power who, beyond an analyst that has no technical background with an unnamed source, has made claims about the actual processing power of the Wii U?
If we're talking about perceived processing power, I think both Sony and Microsoft's next console with struggle with seeming only slightly more powerful than their current generation systems, There are three factors at play:
- Sony/Microsoft released bigger and more expensive systems which have far higher energy consumption than consoles typically have been in order to increase processing power this generation, and I expect they will return to a more standard console in the next generation. If they're looking to release a system for $400 without bleeding money, that is more in line with their slim versions of their current systems, it will certainly not be as much of a technical powerhouse when released.
- Diminishing returns eat away at how people see the improvement. When you look at the better looking elements of many of the better looking games they're about as high detail as we can really expect something to be in a videogame, and most of the graphical effects we will see in the next generation of consoles are already being done on the HD consoles, so what the improvements will be focused on is increasing detail on less important objects and stacking effects ontop of one another. While you will be able to see a difference, it won't really be groundbreaking.
- Limitations of game development costs. Even if developers have all the hardware resources to implement whatever they can imagine, if you need to put 4 times the manpower into creating games to give your graphics that generational jump beyond what the HD consoles are doing few publishers will pay for that. The average cost of a HD console game is in the $20 Million range, with many big budget games being $40+ Million, and if the costs increase this generation like they have every generation since the NES the average game would be closer to $80 Million with big budget games approaching $200 Million.
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1. The current trend in mobile computers in the form of tablet, phones and notebooks is forcing hardware manufacturers to put a renewed focus on low heat low power proccesors. Combined with the longer than usual generation should meant that price, power and heat will be less of a factor going forword. There are many technologies like Nvidia and Intel's 3D procesors and alternative meterails that will start to hit in the next 2 years that will drive the negative factors down. Next year manufacturers are looking to leap to 22nm transisters from the current widely used 45nm for example by 2013 the likely release year for the next gen that will be a mature proccess.
2. Deminishing returns will more likely lead to an even bigger push as it will be needed to show consumers new experiances that don't seem possible on the current generation. The generation coming up will also probably be the generation of consoles as we know them so it will benefit them to push for consoles that have a lot of staying power. Services like onLive will become actually viable over the next 5-10 years and will most likely replace consoles as they have many of the advantages over consoles as consoles have (or had) over PCs, in that you don't need to worry about instaling games or keeping them up to date, you can jump into a game or watch someone else play with a click of a button and no need to buy games, just play what you want like netflix. Plus OnLive people are saying with distributed proccessing games will look like current CGI so if next gen consoles aren't pushing visuals OnLive will.
3. A large leap in power could also lead to cheaper games as costly time intensive tasks like pre baking shadow maps and lighting will be replaced with real time effects that can be turned on with the press of a button. Tessellation allows much more complex geometry to be generated procedurally and allows dynamic water and procedural deformation that will reduce the number of unique assets that need to be generated. And fidality doesn't really increase cost that much as most assets are currently "optomised" by reducing as much detail as possible while maintaining the look to improve performance, the real increase in cost over last generation came from the number of assets needed, where before is was ok to have a shelf be a texture on a box in this generation developers are already placing hundreds of assets in a house creating every vase, book, spoon etc but once you are already placing and creating the number of assets they are now there is not much point adding more than is realistic, it doesn't cost a lot to not compress the textures etc. Also procedural generated content will help lower costs, today it is mostly just used to create trees (every time you see a speed tree logo every tree in that game was procedurally generated) or maybe NPCs like in Assasin's creed next generation procedural generation will be used (or should be) for most background assets. Procedual buildings, NPCs, rocks, terrain and more will all be genrated procedurally rather than with hundreds of outsourced artists of course important assets like main characters will still be hand crafted for the perfect look and the assets that can't be easaly generated but proceduaral generation should help lower costs a lot.
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1) There is an increased focus on low cost energy efficient processors but this doesn't change physics or moores law. While not a perfect relationship, the raw processing power in a processor is directly related to the number of transistors times the clock-speed, and the amount of energy consumed (heat produced) is directly related to the number of transistors times the clock speed, and the cost of a processor is directly related to the number of transistors and the manufacturing process used. You can increase the real world performance towards a particular task by creating specific instructions, but that also increases the number of transistors so there are limits to how far you can take this without having an impact on energy consumption and cost.
2) I don't think you understand what I'm saying ... We have been faced by diminishing returns since the beginning of the modern videogame industry. To get the kind of "Gain" we saw from the PS2 to the PS3 we will need a system that is (probably) over 100 times as powerful as the PS3. We won't have that kind of processing power available for a couple of years, and it won't be affordable for a couple years after that, so it probably won't be used in Next generation hardware.
3) Procedural generation is (probably) 10 to 20 years away from being advanced enough to lower the work associated with creating game assets for the vast majority of games. Until that day, every object you see in the game world will be created by a person who earns a regular pay-check. As you increase the detail of an object the person who is creating it has to spend more time working on it, and it increases the cost of the single asset. Beyond this, as you increase detail in an environment you require more objects to populate it otherwise it seems barren and stale. We have averaged an increase in development costs between generations of roughly 300% with every generation because of this problem.
I could be wrong but I expect publishers don't want to push development costs (that) much higher and they will (for the most part) look to create games that have similar development budgets to what we see on the HD consoles.
