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John Carmack Predicts The Next Gen Of Consoles With Be 10 Times As Powerful, More

N

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
Eurogamer just put up a new interview with John Carmack today. It seems there are a lot of review embargoes ending with him.

Today's topics? The power of next generation consoles and cloud computing.

Eurogamer said:
Eurogamer: Despite them being out for five years?

John Carmack: There is too much there. If you just looked at the manual sets for everything about the core processor, the cell processors, the GPUs and the development environments on there, probably no-one even knows all the switches to the linker to optimise all the different things on here. It's just too much information for one person to know at that level of detail. And hence there's still unexplored territory for different ways to go about things.

So, I'm happy. I'd like us to do a few more games with all this technology we've leveraged on here. The next-generation will be here soon, in a couple of years. That's going to be that much farther beyond that. It'll be another ten times as powerful as this. I'd be surprised if that doesn't last over a decade before people wind up saying, well, we've really tapped out everything you could possibly do on there.
Click to expand...
Eurogamer said:
Eurogamer: But for the time being you're happy with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360?

John Carmack: I really am. We've got other games in development now that are working with this. There's still a lot more we can use. We'll suck up any resources that are given to us. If people come out and say, OK, now you've got four gigs of RAM and all this, we'll happily use it. It'll make our lives better. The games will get better. The graphics will get better. Things will improve in a lot of ways.

But I'm not feeling terribly constrained by this current generation yet.
Click to expand...
Eurogamer said:
John Carmack: There are a lot of factors that can go on there. And shoot, once we're out ten years cloud-based gaming is almost a shoe-in. It's not a shoe-in this year or next year, but if you look ten years out, piping everything over a broadband connection, there are huge advantages to doing that.

Eurogamer: Does that mean the end of home consoles?

John Carmack: It might. There are a lot of different factors there, where computing power is getting so ridiculously cheap and we carry so much of it around. People's telephones could be their home console, and it just beams over to the TV set when they're there and they want that experience. Do we want these separate walled gardens: here's what we've got on our PC, here's what we've got on our console, here's what we've got on our mobile phone?

There's at least an argument that you wind up carrying around enough processing power with you to satisfy all of those and you dock them into different things when you go there. It could play out in lots of different ways. There's not one valid path to the next-generation of technology.
Click to expand...
Source: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-06-16-john-carmack-the-future-now-interview
 
S

StuBurns

Banned
He said this in GiantBomb's interview too. He also said top end PCs now are ten times more powerful.

Given the fixed spec and APIs, consoles will typically out perform comparable PCs by double, so we should see double TW2 style performance by the end of next-gen.
 
G

gerg

Member
Graphics ten times better?

I kind of think that the industry deserves to collapse if it rushes down that route and doesn't make precautions via changing business models. I can't imagine what production costs would be like.
 
R

Raide

Member
It really depends on Sony and MS. If they are brave enough to launch a costly console, it will have a nice spec. They might be worried about the current economical climate and release a slight upgrade to what we currently have.
 
f@luS

f@luS

More than a member.
StuBurns said:
He said this in GiantBomb's interview too. He also said top end PCs now are ten times more powerful.

Given the fixed spec and APIs, consoles will typically out perform comparable PCs by double, so we should see double TW2 style performance by the end of next-gen.
Click to expand...
i would be really sad to have only witcher x2 by end of next gen
 
D

Discotheque

Banned
I'm tripping balls right now, I swear I saw this thread before and read the same comments. the exact same comments.

This is some Matrix shit right now. Whoa.
 
K

Knox

Member
gerg said:
Graphics ten times better?

I kind of think that the industry deserves to collapse if it rushes down that route and doesn't make precautions via changing business models. I can't imagine what production costs would be like.
Click to expand...
Ten times as powerful. Graphics are hitting diminishing returns, so it takes a lot more power to get big graphical improvements.
 
A

angrybus

Banned
Kinda makes me wish the console versions of Battlefield 3 could be brought out as launch games for the next Xbox or whatever in late 2012. Only because A) I'm going to buy the new Xbox/PS regardless and B) I can't invest in a big-ass PC to play the game properly and don't really want a bastard version on 360/PS3.
 
S

StuBurns

Banned
f@luS said:
i would be really sad to have only witcher x2 by end of next gen
Click to expand...
Well so much of a game's visual impact is beyond it's ability to throw polygons at the screen and have high resolution textures, high density volumetric particle effects and other fancy things. There will still be games that blow the Witcher away visually, they just won't do it with four times the polycounts or whatever.

In fact TW2 is only DX9, there's a lot of graphical effects that next-gen games will have that it doesn't.
 
D

dalin80

Banned
Cloud gaming doesn't stand a chance with more and more ISP's limiting bandwidth and restrictions getting tighter.
 
M

markot

Banned
It's not a shoe-in this year or next year, but if you look ten years out, piping everything over a broadband connection, there are huge advantages to doing that.


>_<

such as?
 
N

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
Heavy said:
Anyone know how much more powerful the PS3 and 360 are vs. the PS2 and OG Xbox? In terms of "X times more powerful..."
Click to expand...
That kind of varies a lot by part and which of the two boxes we are talking about.

"10" here should be viewed as sort of an average over most of the parts.
 
G

gerg

Member
Knox said:
Ten times as powerful. Graphics are hitting diminishing returns, so it takes a lot more power to get big graphical improvements.
Click to expand...

However, I presume it still requires a lot more effort to use that a lot more power. In that case, the concern over yet another leap in average budgets should not be unfounded.

Opus Angelorum said:
Having something capable of being ten times more powerful is not the same as being ten times more powerful.
Click to expand...

That might be a more significant distinction if the industry were structured differently. As it is, almost all games come out at the singular price point, and while almost all of them are very quickly discounted after release, this means that a mid-level game from one company still forced to compete more directly against the latest EA or Activision blockbuster. Generally speaking, what one company can do very quickly becomes the standard that every other company must d.

If there were much more flexibility within pricing (to fill the gap between a £5 downloable title and a £50 retail release), I can see more studios weathering a particularly large jump in processing power.
 
W

wsippel

Banned
This "overall factor" bullshit really needs to die. It simply doesn't work that way, it's misleading and confusing. It hardly works for a single component, let alone a whole system.
 
eso76

eso76

Member
i think he knows, rather than predicts.

Even if specs are not final, i suppose some of them are known among devs.
Actually, if xbox1080 is indeed going to be at E3 next year, someone probably has some kind of very early devkit already.
 
S

StuBurns

Banned
dalin80 said:
Cloud gaming doesn't stand a chance with more and more ISP's limiting bandwidth and restrictions getting tighter.
Click to expand...
It never did. Client side rendering has constantly got better quicker, it was only ever going to be a stop gap.
 
X

Xater

Member
darkwing said:
so Wii U is ten times as powerful as the current consoles?
Click to expand...

No because it's not really a next-gen system.

Carmack usually knows his stuff when it comes to future developments in technology. He is probably pretty spot on.
 
M

markot

Banned
dalin80 said:
Cloud gaming doesn't stand a chance with more and more ISP's limiting bandwidth and restrictions getting tighter.
Click to expand...
Yeah, or those of us in third world countries where we have had to live with caps for ages >_< (Australia lol!)
 
D

Discotheque

Banned
darkwing said:
so Wii U is ten times as powerful as the current consoles?
Click to expand...

I don't think people are looking at the Wii U at the right angle. It's clearly the long-rumored Wii HD. More powerful than current gen consoles and finally has the ability to output in HD. But it's not the next gen leap that people are expecting between PS3 and 4 for example.
 
S

SolarPowered

Member
Those expectations are pretty reasonable. A 10x power jump co-relates pretty well with guaranteed 720p with 60FPS as a standard.

I expect most games on the PS4 and 720 to run very efficiently. They'll probably be powerful enough that developers will have a hard time taxing them.
Heavy said:
Anyone know how much more powerful the PS3 and 360 are vs. the PS2 and OG Xbox? In terms of "X times more powerful..."
Click to expand...
Way past 10x...
maniac-kun said:
Its 10x as powerfull as a Wii.
Click to expand...
Zing...
 
S

subversus

I've done nothing with my life except eat and fap
Gram Negative Cocci said:
Next-gen of consoles excluding Wii U is the best thing to happen to PC gaming since Steam.
Click to expand...

lol you wish.

We'll need top of the line hardware again to chug through console ports at 30 fps in 720p. Don't forget about overheads.
 
G

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
10x more powerful would be fairly conservative vs previous generational improvements. Moreso considering the length of this gen (at least for MS/Sony). I think/hope it's not an unreasonable expectation.
 
G

Gram Negative Cocci

Member
Combichristoffersen said:
Carmack knows his shit, but I sort of have a hard time believing the PS4/Xbox 720 will have 10x the power of the PS360.
Click to expand...

Top high-end PCs had that much power for a while now. I mean top of the line (SLI etc.).
 
T

TheOddOne

Member
eso76 said:
i think he knows, rather than predicts.

Even if specs are not final, i suppose some of them are known among devs.
Actually, if xbox1080 is indeed going to be at E3 next year, someone probably has some kind of very early devkit already.
Click to expand...
Well there was that leak that EA already has them, but they took their time with responding so I think we will see it next year.
 
P

PSGames

Junior Member
markot said:
It's not a shoe-in this year or next year, but if you look ten years out, piping everything over a broadband connection, there are huge advantages to doing that.


>_<

such as?
Click to expand...

Well for them they don't have to worry about used games or piracy. For us we don't have to pay for the hardware anymore.
 
N

nephilimdj

Member
Heavy said:
Anyone know how much more powerful the PS3 and 360 are vs. the PS2 and OG Xbox? In terms of "X times more powerful..."
Click to expand...

I thought the xbox was about the power of one of the late model TNT2 (1999?), 360 being 7800 mobile spec wise(2006)
the jump is HUGE
 
G

gundamkyoukai

Member
10x more powerfully than current system seem okay , it's not like gfx going to get 10x times better . Just having really good lighting can kill allot of power but also make games look so much better .
Some games going to look crazy good next gen once we don't gimp the ram.
 
K

knitoe

Member
Carmack agrees with what I been saying for awhile now. Wait for the GAF armchair electrical engineer to come out and prove him wrong.
 
M

Metal-Geo

Member
Isn't the iPad 2 9x more (graphically, at least) powerful than the first iPad model?

10x sounds like a realistic number.
 
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