Next-gen graphics (Hoping) This is the part where I can talk about what
I hope to see in up-coming games.
A lot of it will be repeated from my old video on this subject, only hopefully this video
will have clearer examples.
Firstly, in my 2008 video I was hoping for an increase in parallax mapping in games.
Well, forget I said that.
It has been replaced with another, better, and far simpler solution- TESSELLATION.
This is effectively just increasing the number of triangles things are made out of as you
get closer to them, which gives the impression of more detail.
If you had infinite processing power this could replace things such as bump mapping-
in fact, rendering everything in 3D first is how they generate the bump maps for characters
in the first place.
But for now a blend of the two is the most efficient way to go.
I hope that movement gets a once-over in games.
Rockstar seem the only ones capable of really fluid animations at the moment.
Check out Grand Theft Auto 4 and Max Payne 3, both using Euphoria’s animation system
which can combine animations and let the computer go free-style if it needs to.
For example, if you decide to make Max jump head-first into a concrete pillar.
We’re beginning to see decent physics being implemented into new games.
Borderlands 2 has tons of debris, rip-able cloth and real-time liquid thrown in thanks
to Nvidia’s physx, but an open-source alternative for both Nvidia and AMD to use is needed if
these effects are to be included for more than just visual effects in games.
After trying out 3D in games, I like the idea but it’s still poorly supported in most
games.
It does well in games where the action goes on up-close (Like Portal) or where the cameras
for individual eyes are far enough away from each other to make everything look 3D (I find
third person games do better at this than first person games).
The only time it really breaks the game is where a 3D crosshair isn’t supported, making
the targeting in games impossible (Unreal Tournament 3, for example).
The real problem is that you have a choice between 3D and double the FPS, which can instead
be put towards better graphics and gameplay-related improvements.
If anything, 3D benefits older games better than it does new ones, breathing a new lease
of life into them.
You can't beat Deus Ex in 3D with 32x antialiasing!
Next gen graphics (realistic) and next gen console speculation
I will be mentioning the consoles a lot in this video, because like them or not, they
are the baseline that game developers aim for when making games.
They both contain custom processors which make them incredibly difficult to compare
to PCs in terms of power, but their graphics cards are the equivalent of the Geforce 7900
/ radeon 1900 series.
Computer hardware is now many generations ahead of the consoles, as you can see from
this list dating back to the year 2000.
You can also see how large the gap is compared with between previous generations.
Most games today have a minimum requirement of a Geforce 8800 or radeon 2900- this is
because this is roughly how powerful the consoles are, plus a little bit more because PCs never
seem to be as efficient at running games and they tend to run the games at higher resolutions.
Graphics technology has slowed down since these consoles were released, perhaps this
is because further advancements are harder to achieve, or maybe there just simply isn’t
any point, since all games are made with the consoles in mind.
The geforce 9000 series was a refresh of the 8000 series, the 200 series was a jump up,
they skipped 300 completely for desktops and since then have had 3 series, each more powerful
than the last.
It's about time they refreshed the console hardware.
Now for fun I’m just going to predict what the next generation of consoles will be like.
I'm predicting that they're going to be a fair bit more powerful than today's consoles,
since I don't see it worth Sony's or Microsoft's time to release a console that's hardly any
more powerful than the last, especially since it will be powering games for the next 10
years or so.
I wouldn't be surprised if they had a custom-made 8 or 16 core processor, where each core is
significantly less powerful than the one in, say, your PC.
This is based off the way they had a tri-core processor in current consoles and how well
it performed against dual core PCs at the time.
Who knows, AMD’s method of having more cores may eventually pay off if they go down this
route of optimising games for large number of cores.
Intel were experimenting with a 48 core processor a couple of years ago, there must be some
kind of benefit to it.
I see it as the most logical way to go, instead of trying to make a couple of cores as efficient
as possible at crunching large amounts of data.
I mean, what was the reason for going multi-core in the first place?
As for the graphics card, I’ve heard rumours that it will have a Radeon 76501 which I think
would be a real disappointment if it’s true- it would hardly be any more powerful than
the current generation2, possibly able to run today’s console games but at full HD
and at slightly better frame-rates.
A more powerful GPU, or a dual GPU option would be more beneficial.
Most new processors have a graphics card built in3.
Although still fairly slow, they're getting better and may eventually used in crossfire
with a separate graphics card to effectively double performance.
If the next gen has 'dual graphics', I reckon it would be something along these lines.
As for RAM, RAM is cheap and I hope that the next generation has as much of it as possible.
Currently, the Xbox360 and PS3 have 512 MB of RAM altogether, for both graphics and general
use.
This is a real limiting factor when it comes to textures in-game, and this is the one main
area that current games could improve graphically.
Chuck in 8 GB and watch the detail in games go up, and the loading times go down- something
that has been promised for a long time, yet doesn’t seem to improve as new generations
come out.
Another hint at the power of the next generation consoles comes from the tech demos that are
coming out for next-generation engines.
The Unreal 4 engine and Square Enix’s4 are both running on a single geforce 680- this
suggests that this could be the baseline for the next generation of consoles.
It would certainly be a big step up from current consoles, what with the 680 being arguably
the most powerful single-gpu in the world5 right now.
Don’t try and calculate what sort of spec they could fit in for a £400 selling-price,
I have no doubt that the sum of the hardware in the next generation of consoles will be
more than their selling price initially.
This happened with both the Xbox360 and the PS3 and was done to make them as future-proof
as possible.
This explains this generation’s extended life.
I’m sure it will be the same with the next generation, and definitely hope that it’s
the case since it will be the baseline hardware for new games to aim for until the next, next-gen.
1 http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1708330 2 http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/611?vs=613
– geforce 240 is slightly below the geforce 8800 for performance, which is as close as
I can get to the geforce 7900 which is in current generation consoles.
3 http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/46157-amd-a10-5800k-dual-graphics-evaluation/?page=2 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVX0OUO9ptU
5 http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/555?vs=508 ---------------
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