Game Consoles: How Much Horsepower Is Left This Gen?IndustryGamers: Do you believe there's more to be done with PS3 or Xbox 360, in terms of pushing visuals, or are they both basically on equal footing?
Julien Merceron: In theory, PS3 and Xbox 360 *should* be on equal footing... The reason is that Sony and Microsoft designed these 2 consoles for a quite similar launch time frame, with a quite similar pricing structure, with similarities in their target audience and ambitions. With this in mind, overall, how could one of them end up with a console twice as powerful as the other one? In theory, they should be quite similar, and in the reality this is what we tend to see. Obviously when we talk about the potential for additional improvements, it is a different reasoning that we have to do: we have to look into the hardware and software differences between PS3 and Xbox 360! Sony tried to aim for a quiet console, they put a Hard Disk Drive in all of them, the CPU was designed for FLOPS and parallelism. On the other side, Microsoft launched almost a year earlier, they designed a really intuitive and easy to use hardware architecture, and delivered a fully featured software development kit enabling developers to really tap into Xbox 360 potential very early on... as a result, some consumers could have gotten the feeling in 2006/2007 that – graphically – Xbox 360 games were more advanced, but – today – it is quite different in fact!
Personally, I’d say that – on PS3 – I believe there are some major improvements that can still be done, taking advantage of parallelisation and using more of the CPU for graphics tasks. At the end of current home Console life cycle, it is very possible consumers might get the feeling PS3 is slightly ahead of Xbox 360 in terms of graphics, but it will only happen if developers dedicate time to really push things on PS3!
Michael Condrey: Graphic improvements continue to push the visuals to new bars every year and next year should be no different. I don’t expect the leap forward to be as large as the early console years, but the cycle isn’t over yet either. New innovative approaches will move the best in class titles forward again next year. By how much, will depend on how well the developers respond to tackling the most challenging optimizations.
Yosuke Hayashi: PS3 came out a year later than the X360. Because of its later arrival, I would say that the PS3 has a slight advantage in performance. As with most 3rd Party developers, the focus is on developing our games as multi-platform releases. I can tell you that we do not form strategies to make a game better on one console than another just because of its slight advantage. Instead, we use each console’s respective power and attributes in order to make our games the best they can be for each platform.
Matt Bilbey: There’s no mistaking the visual fidelity of the HD experiences, especially in sports titles, for the Xbox 360 and PS3. Making a game that plays AND looks great will always be a priority. But we’re also just as focused today on creating socially-connected experiences, which we know from gamers is also incredibly important to them. It’s just another reason why today’s consoles continue to offer such a canvas for us to develop for.
IndustryGamers: Do you ever feel limited by the current consoles' power? Do you think new consoles are needed soon to advance the industry?
Julien Merceron: Obviously current consoles’ power is limiting... But some people will tell you it’s great to work under constraints!
Today, the great thing is that our internal technologies are pretty mature on PS3 and Xbox 360. Our developers know how things work, and get a good feeling of where is the limit of what can be achieved. Since they tend to all be very ambitious, they tend to push above the limit of the comfort zone all the time, but – with the years of experience and technology support they have - they know when they move into unknown territory: they then adopt a specific process to solve some of these complex problems that require generally some very creative solutions!
But there are limits, yes, definitely... There are limits in how dynamic and interactive worlds can be, how smart entities can be, how non linear storytelling can be, how much “Online” worlds can be, how content can be accessed and purchased, how community management can operate, etc. Graphically, there are limits in the way we can manage translucent objects, there are limits in the way we can manage cloth and hair and skin, there are limits in how high fidelity facial and body animations can be, there are limits in how much more complex lighting models can be, there are limits in how specularity and reflections can be managed, there are limits to how much filtering can be done to the picture, there are limits to the quality of stereoscopic 3D, and more!
Now, is a new generation really needed soon? Yes, I think. On one hand, that would allow me to enable our artists and designers to craft new types of experiences. On the other hand – and think this is actually the most important of all - I believe that players have changed over the last 5 years, their habits have changed. Over the last 5 years, we got the iPhone, we got the iPad, we got iCloud, we got Onlive and Gaikai, we saw the success of Facebook as a gaming platform, Social and Community features have never been as important as in the recent years, we saw the rise of Digital, we saw Internet TVs, we saw Mobile devices featuring DirectX9 class of hardware, and new business models emerged (ie Freemium)... in less than 2 years from now, some Mobile devices will be as powerful as an Xbox 360! All potential players around the world live and breathe in this world of change, and what they will want in a few years is different from what they wanted 5 years ago. So I expect Xbox 360 and PS3 to age quite fast from now on, as some trends are moving faster than Moore’s Law. From that perspective I say we need new Home Consoles, ones that are better adapted to the lifestyle of the players of tomorrow.
Michael Condrey: As a developer, there are a lot of opportunities with a hardware jump that excite me. Consistent with every other hardware transition I’ve experienced, the late cycle is filled with anticipation and speculation on the next-gen capabilities. However, I really enjoy this late cycle period of development on the current generation. I think the fall line-up of AAA games is greater than ever this year, and it speaks to teams being able to leverage their experience on this generation to deliver really outstanding work. At Sledgehammer Games, we have the team and console experience to push the current-gen’s horsepower to its limits, and that allows us to make our games better than ever. We are extremely efficient as a development team on the current generation consoles. With the core learning phase behind us, we can iterate and innovate within the game faster than ever. New mechanics and interesting game play innovations can come at any phase of the cycle, and in many ways the late phases really promote innovative thinking. Developers spend less time having to figure out the “how”, giving more time to iterate on the “what”. Every part of the development team, be it an engineer, designer, artist, animator, or audio specialist, is always looking to push their discipline further. They are always looking to improve from their previous title. Plus, the installed base is massive. There are tens of millions of fans looking forward to the holiday blockbuster seasons on this generation. Next year there will be a bigger installed base of fans than ever. That, too, is exciting and inspiring and will drive the teams to push harder than ever on this generation of games.
Yosuke Hayashi: I think this is two questions, so I’ll answer with two responses. First, as a game developer, you always want to have more power to play with but at the same time, I personally don’t feel limited for the games we are creating for PS3 and X360.
The answer to the second question is no. No, I don’t think there is a great need anytime soon for the next generation of consoles to advance the industry. I say this because I believe that gamers thirst for great content, which doesn’t necessarily rely on new console hardware as there are other options to produce a good console game experience. A good and captivating game is just that. As a an avid gamer I can still see myself playing on X360 and PS3 for a bit longer since there continues to be great new games. A recent example is Battlefield 3, which to me, is something reminiscent of the early days of gaming where arcade games were ported down to home consoles. It is obvious to me that Battlefield 3 was developed for high-spec PCs but then down-converted to the X360 and PS3.
In order to advance the gaming industry into the future, performance on its own is not the key. We certainly cannot forget the necessity to increase the actual performance in order to maximize the experience in a game, but we also definitely need to look at new and different ways to propel our industry forward.
