Unstupendous Next-gen Consoles and the Revenge of PC?

The Rumors
The hardware specs for the next generation of gaming consoles, namely Orbis (which is a codename for the next PlayStation) and Durango (for the next Xbox) are just rumors and speculations at the moment. Here?s what?s rumored: Orbis is going to have an AMD x86 CPU, plus an AMD ?Southern Islands? (i.e. Radeon HD 7000 series) GPU. Durango is rumored to have a 16-core IBM POWER family CPU with (again) an AMD Southern Islands GPU. I don?t know how much RAM either of these systems might have, and I?ll be happy to know of any rumors that might be flying around if anyone knows of any.

Hardware specifications for Nintendo?s Wii U, while not completely known, are at least official. They also list a ?multi-core? IBM POWER-based CPU and an AMD GPU.

Change from Current Generation
For the next generation, Microsoft has not changed manufacturers of its two main parts. Xbox 360 also uses an IBM CPU and an AMD (then ATI) GPU. But Sony has turned its back to its previous suppliers (including itself.) Instead of the CELL Broadband Engine jointly developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, with an Nvidia designed and manufactured GPU, Sony has given the heart and soul of its next flagship console to AMD to play with. For completeness?s sake, the current generation high-end consoles both have 512MiB of RAM, although they use different configurations and specs.

AMD GPUs FTW!
If the rumors turn out to be close to reality, AMD will turn out to be the most important and unrivaled-in-that-importance gaming hardware manufacturer for the coming generation. The obvious first benefit is the revenue they will be harvesting from all those Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony consoles sold. Besides that, they will be in a unique position to drive the next generation of graphics. Also, since all these platforms will have AMD GPUs, PC developers (most of whom have an eye towards console targets) might also become inclined to use their hardware for development, testing and optimization.

The Steam hardware survey shows AMD?s GPU adoption at 35%, versus Nvidia?s current lead at 47%. The above, added to my own personal opinion that AMD?s GPUs have better performance and features at the same price point as Nvidia?s, might finally let AMD displace Nvidia as the top gaming GPU seller for the desktop. I hope neither capture too big a lead though, as a monopoly will certainly mean trouble and being ignored for the users.

An Integrated Dream for PlayStation 4

If both CPU and GPU of Orbis are indeed made by AMD, there is a chance for that platform to offer new levels of integration and cooperation between these two most important components of that system. Of course, all console platforms (except maybe a few, by which I mean the original Xbox!) have been much more integrated and accessible than PCs (where you have 16 layers of APIs and operating systems and drivers and crap between you and hardware,) but still there is more opportunity for integration and low-level cooperation when a high-end console?s CPU and GPU are designed and manufactured by the same company.

Since AMD?s general direction in the past years have been integrating CPUs and GPUs (albeit in the low-end end,) I can only wonder what Orbis will actually be like and capable of.

Generational Gap with PCs

When the last generation high-end consoles were released (in 2005 and 2006) they both boasted around 10 times compute power compared to typical high-end PCs of their day. This time around though, even if these two new consoles were released today, they wouldn?t be more powerful than enthusiast PCs that anybody with a few thousand bucks can buy. Much cheaper at the same performance; sure, but nothing to be excited about. (Note that some of the 16 cores in Durango, for example, are going to be dedicated to run its version of Kinnect, which brings the number of available cores down to 12 or 10 or 8, which is not that remarkable today.)

And they are not going to be released this hour. The consensus in the industry seems to be that they are going to be launched at the end of 2013 at the earliest, which is still 15 months off. It seems obvious that by then, even mid-high-end PCs will be comparable to them in theoretical power. So, the generation gap between consoles and PCs will be a thing of the past; and that means PCs will have much more juice in them at least to the end of this decade.

Cost-mitigating Hardware

So, why this unstupendous hardware? Simple: to control costs. Both the costs of the hardware at launch (and the couple of years after that) and much more importantly, the cost of developing games for these platforms. There is a very insightful and very informative article called the Rise of Costs, the Fall of Gaming about this subject, which I recommend for anyone even the least bit interested in video games.

It seems clear that most of AAA games need to take advantage of the power of the platforms they run on, or they will be considered inferior-looking and last-gen by many if not most gamers and game media. This mostly means higher-quality and more detailed textures, models, animations, sounds, etc. and more content in all areas. And this almost always directly translates to higher production budgets for those AAA games. Of course, other grades of games have to follow suit too.

Therefore, by introducing an overpowered platform, console manufacturers automatically increase the costs of making games for those platforms, and this is not something the content-makers and their consumers (who ultimately will be stuck with the costs) want.

It makes a lot of sense to me for the next generation of the consoles to be more powerful than the current generation by only a manageable margin. This lets the developers keep most of their current tools and technologies and processes in place (all of which have cost a lot of money, experience and time to create) and also helps mitigate the rampant race in useless graphical quality. And anything that occurs to me, obviously has occurred years ago to the experts in the field.

Revenge of the PC

Right now, at the end of a console generation cycle, an average gaming PC has more power than the consoles. And the games with best visuals that are unencumbered by platform politics all have their best presentations by far on the PC (e.g. Battlefield 3, Crysis 2, Rage, etc.)

With the release of the new generation, for probably the first time in the past decades, this pattern will continue and PCs will still hold the cutting edge. However, the general gamer public will always view consoles as the standard for visuals and presentation quality. This puts the PC in a unique position of being more powerful and at the same time not having to have much better looks.

The new generation of consoles will also be more like PCs, hardware-wise. Certainly much more similar than say, the CELL was!

Since developing anything for PCs is already easier (more tools, more accessible platform and information, developers more familiar with PCs) and the hardware in PCs will be more like those available in consoles (which mitigates some costs and hardship in porting code and content) and the PCs will have more power in them, the cost of development and porting of games to the PC will probably be much lower compared to consoles (certainly with a wider gap than over the lifetime of the current console generation.)

This, in all probability, won?t be able to dethrone consoles as the primary gaming platform, but may speed up the revival of PC as a target for more AAA games and more respect and care from the game developers. I myself certainly hope so!

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Source: http://yaserzt.com/blog/archives/595

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