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Well with the Xbox 720 being announced next year along with a probable release sometime 4th quarter 2012/1st quarter 2013 what are your predictions as to the hardware that will be in this beast?
I know that someone from ATI said we could expect "Avatar quality graphics"...now considering that consoles run HIGHLY optimized engines and code what do we have now that could do this? I was talking to a friend of mine and he guessed that something like a GTX560ti/6870 could possibly deliver such graphics. I however am guessing by the Unreal 4 Engine tech demo that to do something like that at 1080p even on 90-100% optimized hardware would require at least a 6970 or GTX580 to run perfectly smooth.
Also on the topic of graphics, I was reading a OLD Computer Gaming Monthly magazine from years ago and they had an article showing off the "new" Unreal 3 Engine...the writer said the PC used to show it off was using dual Nvidia 6800 Ultras to acheive the 30fps the demo was running at. Now you look at current consoles and the Xbox 360 has a ATI X1900 type GPU...which is roughly twice as fast (if not faster?) that dual 6800 Ultras...so can we assume that since the Unreal 4 tech demo was using dual GTX480's that the next generation consoles will be using a GPU roughtly the same speed a two GTX480's? That would be my guess...ESPECIALLY if the next-gen consoles are most likely going to be fully 3D ready...you'd need a pretty powerful GPU to pull off Unreal 4 like graphics in stereoscopic 3D at 1080p and up resolutions.
As far as the rest of the hardware we all know that the next Xbox is going to have Blu-Ray...I highly doubt Microsoft will try a proprietary format nor will they stick with DVD again. Hard drive storage? I still see mechanical drives being the main medium here still, as even cheap 64GB SSD are still $100+. With next gen consoles probably being more media-centric than ever I see them shipping with 100's of GB worth of storage, which just isn't possible with current SSD prices.
RAM? Who knows really...will they have 2GB DDR5? 4GB DDR3? Something entirely different like what AMD is doing with RAMBUS? I would say based on current consoles (both having 512MB) that next gen, if pushing 3D and 1080p (or higher) I would think that nothing less than 4GB would be used here...especially considering how low RAM prices are now it would be crazy if they didn't.
Processor is something that should be interesting! Will Microsoft decide to go with a standard x86 architecture or go with something out of the ordinary like a Cell processor or perhaps something like the new Intel 50-core (Larrabee :-p ). I'm thinking that with the high-end GPU that will most likely be used we're looking at a 6 to 8 core processor...possibly with multiple threads...to help in not bottlenecking the GPU.
What about things like physics? I feel next-gen will be a major leap forward when it comes to physics...water, cloth, soft-bodies, A.I...will it be a CPU thing? Perhaps OpenCL (since ATI is doing the GPU)? Or maybe it'll be done on an entirely seperate co-processor?
However, despite all this, a part of me also feels like Microsoft doesn't want to lose money on every console for a while like they did with the 360. That part of me feels like we might end up with more humble consoles (Wii U-ish) and not so much a major technological leap forward like we experienced with say the Playstation 2 to Playstation 3.
I don't know...these are all just guesses, and sorry for the long post! I just enjoy, like any [H]ard member should, talking about these types of things!
So what are your predictions?
I know that someone from ATI said we could expect "Avatar quality graphics"...now considering that consoles run HIGHLY optimized engines and code what do we have now that could do this? I was talking to a friend of mine and he guessed that something like a GTX560ti/6870 could possibly deliver such graphics. I however am guessing by the Unreal 4 Engine tech demo that to do something like that at 1080p even on 90-100% optimized hardware would require at least a 6970 or GTX580 to run perfectly smooth.
Also on the topic of graphics, I was reading a OLD Computer Gaming Monthly magazine from years ago and they had an article showing off the "new" Unreal 3 Engine...the writer said the PC used to show it off was using dual Nvidia 6800 Ultras to acheive the 30fps the demo was running at. Now you look at current consoles and the Xbox 360 has a ATI X1900 type GPU...which is roughly twice as fast (if not faster?) that dual 6800 Ultras...so can we assume that since the Unreal 4 tech demo was using dual GTX480's that the next generation consoles will be using a GPU roughtly the same speed a two GTX480's? That would be my guess...ESPECIALLY if the next-gen consoles are most likely going to be fully 3D ready...you'd need a pretty powerful GPU to pull off Unreal 4 like graphics in stereoscopic 3D at 1080p and up resolutions.
As far as the rest of the hardware we all know that the next Xbox is going to have Blu-Ray...I highly doubt Microsoft will try a proprietary format nor will they stick with DVD again. Hard drive storage? I still see mechanical drives being the main medium here still, as even cheap 64GB SSD are still $100+. With next gen consoles probably being more media-centric than ever I see them shipping with 100's of GB worth of storage, which just isn't possible with current SSD prices.
RAM? Who knows really...will they have 2GB DDR5? 4GB DDR3? Something entirely different like what AMD is doing with RAMBUS? I would say based on current consoles (both having 512MB) that next gen, if pushing 3D and 1080p (or higher) I would think that nothing less than 4GB would be used here...especially considering how low RAM prices are now it would be crazy if they didn't.
Processor is something that should be interesting! Will Microsoft decide to go with a standard x86 architecture or go with something out of the ordinary like a Cell processor or perhaps something like the new Intel 50-core (Larrabee :-p ). I'm thinking that with the high-end GPU that will most likely be used we're looking at a 6 to 8 core processor...possibly with multiple threads...to help in not bottlenecking the GPU.
What about things like physics? I feel next-gen will be a major leap forward when it comes to physics...water, cloth, soft-bodies, A.I...will it be a CPU thing? Perhaps OpenCL (since ATI is doing the GPU)? Or maybe it'll be done on an entirely seperate co-processor?
However, despite all this, a part of me also feels like Microsoft doesn't want to lose money on every console for a while like they did with the 360. That part of me feels like we might end up with more humble consoles (Wii U-ish) and not so much a major technological leap forward like we experienced with say the Playstation 2 to Playstation 3.
I don't know...these are all just guesses, and sorry for the long post! I just enjoy, like any [H]ard member should, talking about these types of things!
So what are your predictions?
