Quote:
Originally Posted by Benny003
Basically look at the best looking PC game right now (not a console port) and that's probably what the next generation console games will look like, maybe a touch better if those consoles are still 2 years out. Look at the PC footage for Battlefield 3 coming out this fall. That game probably has the best looking graphics at the moment. New consoles usually measure up to the newest gaming PC's and as they age PC's continue to get better of course. So seeing what is currently on PC's is usually an indicator at least of what can be expected by the next generation consoles.
PC Battlefield 3 in-game footage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UwOr...=youtu.be&hd=1
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That's partially true, but I think it short-sells the next generation a lot. Basically, the new generation is about size. If the new PS3 has a top of the line CPU/GPU combo, 8 GB of RAM, and the new disc size, it'll be able to do things that no PC can. Because gaming consoles are set up to only do what needs to be done in a gaming console, it uses resources in a completely different way. So where 8GB of RAM doesn't sound like much when there's PC units out there with 16 GB or more, a PC's motherboard isn't set up to utilize it in the same way that a console's is.
So, to extend this out farther: if Sony's new disc can hold 6TB and the guts of the console can handle that, it's a game changer. Developers can begin making new engines that even current PCs can't handle, because there's very few PCs out there with a few TBs of free space lying around. Imagine devs being able to send a game out where just the artwork takes up the space of a standard HDD. That would put new consoles way out ahead of what PCs can do, which hasn't happened in a long time.
As someone mentioned, it's always hard to conceptualize how gaming could possibly get better. But it helps to visualize less and think in terms of numbers. An easy example: you know in baseball/football/basketball games where the crowd is a few different character models repeated over and over, doing the same gestures? In Sony's new hypothetical, they have the space and the power to make 50,000 different individually animated fans, 40,000 individually animated soda and beer glasses, 10,000 individually animated buckets of popcorn, billions of individually animated blades of grass, and so on. The technology to do that already exists. Hell, I can do it myself in Cinema4D on this shitty desktop. But with the new capacity of the new systems, they'll actually be able to utilize it.
And maybe you're thinking that that's not really that interesting. Well, expand the same concept to different games. Hypothetically, the new disc format/console power could have a version of GTAIV where every inch of the map, every floor of every building, can be entered into. The only thing holding that back would be animator work-time. Or in a FPS, where every single brick in a building is its own individually animated entity in the engine. The building destruction in Battlefield taken to a ridiculous new height.
I could go on, but it's a size thing. I may know more about the concepts behind it than some, but even for me, it's a brave new world that I know little about.
But it's exciting.