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The 5-Year Console Cycle Is Dead
Pickens writes "The Xbox 360 recently turned five years old, and with no known successor on the horizon for the 360, PlayStation 3 or Wii, Cnet reports on the death of the 5-year console cycle — one of the video game industry's most longstanding truisms. For example, the Nintendo Entertainment System came out in 1985, followed by the Super NES in 1991, the Nintendo 64 in 1996, the GameCube in 2001, and the Wii in 2006. But now, why should console makers upgrade their offerings? Consumers are still buying their machines by the hundreds of thousands each month, and ramped-up online initiatives are breathing new life into the systems. A lot of it has to do with the fact that with the current generation of consoles, each company found a way to maximize either the technology behind the devices, or the utility to a wide range of new gamers."
You need to learn basic geometry.
zosxavius photography
Because when you see it, you'll turn 360 degrees and walk away.
I'd be willing to bet that in the past 5 years graphics technology has improved enough to make it worth replacing the whole guts of a console box with something newer.
I'd also be willing to bet that the economy being shite has reduced the disposable income of the planet to the point where profits on such a development program wouldn't be worth the effort.
But unemployed people have less money and more time, so selling them old technology still makes a pretty good incremental margin.
> vast majority of people playing games at 720p max
Your comment skirts around the issue, but is not entirely accurate. It is not the players, but the game devs themselves that are "not demanding" a new console. The PS3's RSX is ~= 7800 GTX. Most _games_ DON'T render at the native 1080p but at 720p simply because most (PS3) games are GPU bound. (XBox 360 games are CPU bound if you are curious.) That said, currently the SPUs are _still_ under underutilized. Naughty Dog said this a few years back, but it is slowly getting better:
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/832/832114p2.html
"I'm more impressed with the hardware the longer we get to work with it. Imagining trying to develop Uncharted without the Blu-ray drive, without the hard drive, or without the Cell processor makes me wonder what kind of game we would have ended up with. It certainly would have required a lot more compromises than I would have been comfortable making. And much like the PS2, I think the longer developers work with the machine, the better the games are going to get. For instance we are only using approximately 1/3 of the processing power of the SPUs on the Cell processor in Uncharted."
The presentation "Getting Unreal Engine 3 to 60Hz" isn't (yet) available on Devnet, but thankfully can be found here...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/15118967/Hitting-60Hz-in-Unreal-Engine
Other presentations (GDC 2009) worth reading are
* The PlayStation®3's SPUs in the Real World - A KILLZONE 2 Case Study
* Practical SPU Usage in GOD OF WAR 3
It will be REAL interesting to see what Polyphony Digital (Gran Turismo 5), and Team Ico (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus) since these two studios are known to typically push the PlayStation (2 & 3) to its limits.
Cheers
Sorry for the bad netiquette / karma whoring, didn't realize these were available ...
* The PlayStation®3's SPUs in the Real World - A KILLZONE 2 Case Study
http://sijm.ca/2009/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/michiel-van-der-leeuw.pdf
* Practical SPU Usage in GOD OF WAR 3
http://www.tilander.org/aurora/comp/gdc2009_Tilander_Filippov_SPU.pdf
Cheers
-- ...
CPUs & GPUs are still too damn slow.. A graphics programmer who worked on Uncharted 2 (one of the best looking PS3 games available) shares his comments on the future of GPUs / Rendering
http://filmicgames.com/archives/467
You're probably one of those poor deluded souls who think that a thousand euro lens will automatically make for great pictures.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon