JRPGfan said:
I think the resolution crap will end with 4k.... it should be a long time until we go higher.
Much rather they spent additional resources on other graphical aspects than just the resolutions.
Maybe at some point in the far far future, a mobile phone can do that stuff.
However I have my doubts.
Why? Physics.
There are laws of physics that could make it impossible to advance that far ahead.
We re reaching the end of how far down we can shrink these chips (ei. 5nm might be as small as we can make things)
Anyways thats a far ways off, and even then, there will be advantages to BIGGER systems, than smaller ones.
Does this mean a Switch 2? is a bad way to go? not at all.
I just dont think thats the route PS5 or XB2 take, or the future of consoles (other than nintendo).
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tolu619 said:
Those are some really good points. The trade off is power. Once people can have similar power in a device like the switch as they are used to from high end consoles, convenience be the major factor in choosing what to buy. But for now, many are not satisfied with the trade off |
RolStoppable said:
Dallinor said:
Certainly the near-future. It's way too limited in scope to be the entirety of the future.
They're not satifisfied, so they go, where? The industry massively retracts and the flagship franchises just dissapear? Sony and to a lesser extent Xbox are the home of third party games, they are the chain stores that reach the masses . Third parties will follow them, because although you mention Sony needing third parties, the reality is third parties at present, given the direction the industry has taken, also need Sony and MS, or a similar version of them, to reach their audience. They are the safe bet.
By juggling you mean, like the Switch, the future of consoles? And 3 years on, with market trends and comparable hardware to analyse, it will end up being half-baked?
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1. I don't claim it to be the entirety. But it's going to be more successful than the stationary home consoles it competes with. Not only because of the convenience, but also because portable devices have a higher chance to become personalized items, i.e. households are going to own more than one Switch.
2. The PC will always exist. Microsoft could put out a stronger box every three years to stay within reach of gaming PCs, but without calling anything a new generation and not making anything exclusive; that doesn't take much effort and doesn't contradict their current direction of less emphasis on Xbox. With these two things in mind, there will be pressure on Sony to put out a powerful box too. Microsoft may only have a strong presence in the USA and the UK, but it's these two markets (USA being the most important by far) that Western AAA publishers focus on.
3. Juggling a home console and hybrid means a standard PS5 like you'd expect (stationary home console to stay within reach of gaming PCs) and a hybrid that plays PS4 games as long as publishers care enough to port them. The hybrid in this scenario would be halfbaked because it would be a console that plays old games and goes up against Switch which gets all of the latest Nintendo games.
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About Sony and AAA publishers, the former will probably schedule HW evolution also based on the needs of the latter, if they'll keep on being relevant for its consoles. In the short term the safest bet will be to extend its 8th gen life as long as posssible, so, if the hybrid way will be shown by facts as the only viable one, portable HW will be able to offer a performance jump anyway, at least compared to the previous entry level model.
A halfbaked PS5 home + PS4 portable solution wouldn't work more than with meh results: if they won't go the Switch way, with a hybrid device, better either two different architectures, each one dedicated to its specific purpose, home or portable, or a unified architecture with home and portable (possibly hybrid) different devices that offer the same CPU power (viable a little less power on the portable, that would run very few auxiliary programs, or none at all, when not docked) and different GPU power, but this would need very good dev tools that make scaling the game graphics as easy as possible with results that go beyond the automatic scaling offered by most modern game engines.
One more thing: except for devs and publishers mostly targeting power whores, most devs could welcome the pause Switch approach offered on skyrocketing HW requirements for PC and home console games, this, if widespread enough, would change Sony approach too, that having already done a step in this direction with PS4 HW, a lot less expensive than PS3 one if taken at any same time from respective launches, could appreciate cutting costs even more.
Power whores may rant as they want about 4k and even 8k, but the vast majority of gamers, even on PC, eventually reach a point where they're happy with the same performances for quite a long time and from then on they upgrade only when a significant performance boost is possible at a cheap price.
As for VR, it still needs to better input devices, methods, paradigms a lot, but this needs new brilliant ideas and very little additional HW power, while for graphics, like plain stereoscopic 3D without VR, it just needs twice as much GPU power as plain 3D projection on single 2D displays, a given graphics level on traditional displays becomes reachable by VR in less than a half generation time, so a 2020 hybrid will be able to offer VR at Switch res or more and 1080p on 2D displays at decent framerates, this means that HW power will be a problem only if they keep on the power whorish way, but it's very likely that tha vast majority of both devs and users will be happy with the most viable approach.
On one thing only Sony will need to be prodigal, main RAM size, as vast and detailed worlds with many detailed items could eventually start needing to be loaded dynamically or divided in chunks on devices with less RAM. This way less expensive timed exclusives could become de facto permanent ones if porting to the platforms with less RAM were too expensive compared to the possible additional revenue generated.
