Next-Gen Game Consoles Still Years Off

jfruhlinger writes "Gamers who have grown bored with the current generation of game hardware will have to sit tight a bit longer. Word on the street has it that the next PlayStation won't be ready until 2014, and the next Xbox won't appear until Christmas 2013 at the earliest."

Comments

Weird abstract...

[FaxeTheCat]

>bored with the current generation of game hardware

If the gamers are bored with the game hardware, they may find it immensely more interesting to start playing games on it.

Re:Weird abstract...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the PS3 is the GPU, it's essentially a GeForce7800GTX with a few mods. The other problem with the PS3 is the OS. It's so memory hungry compared with the 360. The 360 uses 32MB and it has a 10MB embedded frame buffer for render targets. The PS3 uses (last time I programmed it) 40MB main memory for the OS and 7MB of video memory with no embedded frame buffer. MSAA needs more memory in the PS3 but does NOT on the 360, unless you're going to do more processing on the MSAA frame buffer. The GPU on the PS3 is so slow that you use a significant amount of CPU time reducing the load on the GPU. You usually do backface removal, degenerate triangle removal, zero area triangle removal, offscreen triangle removal and triangles hidden by occluders removal just to reduce load on the vertex pipe. Then you do MSAA resolving and any other image post processing on the SPUs as well.
The PS3's GPU is a boat anchor. A year later and 75% the speed!
I will say however that it was fun to program. You spent all your time doing cool shit optimizing around the GPU, whereas on the 360 you spend your time dong game code. Booooring.

CATCHPA: irking. The perfect work do describe the PS3

Re:Do not want

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, what you're looking for is not a game console, I believe it's called a com pew tur or something like that.

Re:Think Avatar

[Dutch Gun]

How many times do we fall for that line?

"The (next generation of console) will offer graphics comparable to (the latest Hollywood CGI-laden blockbuster)". No. No it won't. It never has, and won't until our computers are so powerful that real-time photo-realism with nearly unlimited levels of detail becomes trivial. As good as current hardware is, it's still nowhere near that point, unless you're content with rendering a very limited scene, which is what all those impressive tech demos do.

Movie graphics are pre-rendered, of course. They take anywhere from minutes to hours per frame to render, and they can use high-end server farms to do this. Consoles are real-time systems. They must render their scene using commodity hardware in 1/30 to 1/60th of a second, in addition to computing everything else a game requires (physics, animation, audio, AI, etc).

I'm guessing some people would be pretty surprised at how much smoke and mirrors are still used, even on modern systems, in order to keep the frame rate reasonable with decent graphical fidelity. If we (speaking as a game developer here) want to be able to run on a reasonable range of systems, we have to do crazy amounts of optimization work. Our artists still have to reuse textures, conserve memory, reduce polygons, use LODs, and simplify shaders. If that's still not enough, then we're forced to cut content out (simplifying models or geometry) until we CAN run in real-time.