Shadow1980 said:
I refuse to believe that this time definitely for sure we've hit or are about to hit the apex of game graphics. There is still tons of room for improvement, and not just consistent framerates and higher resolutions (e.g., 2160p60 as a possible standard). There's still a lot that can be done with respect to lighting and textures, minimizing/eliminating "popping" (still an issue today), aliasing, AI, and other things. While games that have properly leveraged the power of the PS4 look far better than anything offered by last-gen games (and even then they often have to target 30fps to get those visuals), I still see plenty of ways graphics can be improved noticeably beyond what we have today. And it's not like GPUs and computers in general just aren't improving anymore. Now, if it is taking longer to produce those sorts of advancements, I could maybe see the technological justification for releasing incremental improvements to existing platforms rather than creating an entire new platform, but I have my doubts that it can sustain the console market in decade-long generations. There's more than just technological justification for releasing new platforms, after all. There's business justifications as well, i.e., the realities of a console hardware market that has historical exhibited clearly cyclical behavior, with pronounced growth-peak-decline periods. If it's real, the PS4 Neo and possible future upgrades would have to set some sort of new precedent in regards to long-term sales of a platform, which have always followed a roughly bell-shaped platform. Hardware revisions and price cuts (the latter often concurrent with the former) have always had limits. Every system reached a "sweet spot" price where the system reaches peak sales, after which no further price cuts could keep it from continually declining in sales. Even in the rare occasions we had actual spec upgrades to existing systems in the past, the new models didn't keep the platform afloat sales-wise for long. Sooner or later, perhaps sooner, Sony will have to come out with a PlayStation 5. If lack of any real, substanial advancements in hardware does prohibit any real technological justification for a totally new platform by 2020, and if PS4 sales (including all possible hardware revisions) are in a terminal decline phase at least a year or two before then, then Sony may end up having to sustain their revenues and profits primarily on the sales of software and accessories. If the PS5 won't be out until 2023-ish, then PS4 hardware revisions may very well need to be able to keep hardware sales steady for the bulk of that time. |
But I'm not telling it will not improve, in fact we can already see that the current high spec PC are a lot more powerful, and also dev teams improve, with more assets, know-how, bigger teams and budget. But the diminishing return is a fact, and the console reached an optimal architecture (easy to develop, standard, lot of memory, hard drive, no big bottleneck). Again, that's my example, but a new generation that launches within 2 years after the PS4.5 will not show big significant difference. So they have 2 choices. They wait, and this generation last longer. Or they launch quicklyy with no big difference compared to PS4.5... and this generation last even longer.
But this is a discussion about graphics, you talk about many other thing. On business side, that's a very different topic. I don't know if they still want to go for billion dollar investment in R&D and marketing, every generation take the risk to lose and fail on a single product, wait years to reach the peak... A constant market of 2 or 3 compliant console, some declining, some rising, relatively small steps, small risk, small investment, perhaps that's the way to go. That's how the business model is for PC and smartphones.
Last but not least, AI. I have lost any hope for a better AI, what ever the improvement we got in CPU, memory, whatever games promised, it never happened, 10 years pass and mostly no change, just a few game here and there that invested time on better script. Unfortunately, a real AI seems out of reach, and the scripts are good enough and takes a very small amount of CPU. And about that, you can have a taste of the future. PC's CPU are vastly more powerful, and no change in AI.
