Ubisoft Expecting New Consoles By 2012

GamesIndustry is running a brief story about comments from Ubisoft's CEO indicating that the company is gearing up for a new generation of consoles within two to three years. "The French publisher is increasing headcount to work on future technology, with mergers also on the cards to increase development and technology resources. 'We want to take advantage of a company that could bring more technology to us, or new brands,' said CEO Yves Guillemot. 'So we have now enough to help us to grow the company for not only next year but to get ready for the coming of the next generation consoles that are probably going to happen 2011, 2012.'" Guillemot also provided some details about the release plans for some of their upcoming games.

Comments

Re:1080p limitation

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither the PS3 or 360 are giving us true 1080p for most titles. Most are 560-700px and then scaled up. The next iteration of consoles might be able to handle 1920x1080 properly, and if there are cycles to spare, we'll get lots of FX.

SNES vs. Genesis

[tepples]

Wasn't snes faster than megadrive?

Super NES had a 3.6 MHz 16-bit 65C816 CPU on an 8-bit data bus that most games used in 2.7 MHz mode to be able to use cheaper ROM chips. It had no 16x16 multiply instruction. Sega Genesis had a 7.7 MHz 32-bit MC68000 CPU on a 16-bit data bus, the same as the black-and-white Macintosh computers, but the 68000 did take more cycles for each instruction. Each system had an additional CPU used to run the game's music engine.

But what the Super NES lacked in CPU it made up for in video: four times as many 16-color palettes for backgrounds and sprites, a 5-bit-per-channel video DAC (compare the Genesis's 3-bit DAC), an additional layer of tiles in the most common background mode, and a separate texture-mapped background mode called "Mode 7" that allowed rotation and scaling of each scanline. The audio was also sampled instead of FM-synthesized. Genesis wouldn't get features like these until the expensive Sega CD accessory.

Re:SNES vs. Genesis

[Anonymous Coward]

The N64 may have had more peripheral graphics tricks like bilinear filtering, but the Playstation was capable of pushing more polygons. This was very evident when comparing games side by side. The N64 games looked much more blocky with lower resolution textures but those textures were blurred/smoothed. The Playstation had more complex geometry but with pixelated textures that shifted and popped because they lacked perspective correction.

The Playstation also had superior audio to the N64. Mostly this was due to the CD format and being able to store either redbook or compressed audio but even using MIDI like music formats the Playstation far outshined anything the N64 could produce.

The Playstation basically had dedicated hardware integrated directly into the CPU package for everything whereas the N64, even with a more powerful CPU, had to divide the workload among 2 general purpose processors.

Re:1080p limitation

[KDR_11k]

Careful, racing games have a much easier time hitting the graphical ceiling than other games. Cars are mechanical objects that behave according to fairly simple physics. They are the best case for something to display with a computer. Compare that with a human. An organic creature with tons of details on the surface where there is no artistic freedom (people can spot a wrong face very quickly) and with material properties that are damn complex to display (a car has regular diffusion, specularity, etc, flesh has subsurface scattering and such) or simulate (steel is pretty much rigid for most purposes, flesh contains many visibly moving parts, is soft and many of the things that cause the shape are underneath the top layer and thus usually aren't part of a computer model).