AMD: Next Xbox capable of Avatar visuals

By Wesley Yin-Poole Published 18 July, 2011

AI and physics to see vast improvements.

Technology company AMD reckons the next Xbox will be so powerful it will be capable of reproducing graphics on a par with James Cameron's movie blockbuster Avatar.

AMD, rumoured to be providing the graphics technology powering the next Xbox, said in the latest issue of the US version of the Official Xbox Magazine (reported by the Examiner) gamers should expect radical improvements to AI and physics.

Director of ISV relationships at AMD, Neal Robison, said the unannounced console will allow developers to make every pedestrian in a game such as Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row have a totally individual mentality so they react to the player in different ways.

Crowds will reportedly act as individuals rather than predictable mobs.

The Xbox 360 uses AMD's ATI Xenos to power its visuals. AMD refused to confirm whether it was working on the next Xbox.

Last month id Software programming legend John Carmack told Eurogamer the next generation of consoles will be ten times as powerful as the current generation.

Before that, Unreal Engine maker Epic Games released a real-time demo called Samaritan, below, it hopes provides a glimpse into the future of home console visuals.

The next Xbox is rumoured to be set for an E3 2012 reveal.

Picture of Wesley.

About Wesley Yin-Poole

Wesley is Eurogamer's news editor. He likes news, interviews, and more news. He also likes Street Fighter more than anyone can get him to shut up about it.

Read more articles from Wesley by visiting the Wesley Yin-Poole archive page.

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Comments (94) Latest comment 10 months ago

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  • King_Edward #1 10 months ago

    Toy Story graphics \o/

  • karooo #2 10 months ago

    Ridiculous. Although, I am happy they are aiming high unlike Nintendo.

  • Manticore #3 10 months ago

    It'll be just like jacking into the Matrix.

  • Kano-11 #4 10 months ago

    Bullshit. If the next gen looks anything like the video above then I'll be happy.

  • monsieur_qwerty #5 10 months ago

    Like the Playstation 3 could run Shrek like graphics? This will cost a bomb when it comes out, have games that arent using the full hardware and probably have a modern iteration of the RROD. Far too predictable MS, far too predictable.

  • octo #6 10 months ago

    haha! And so the cranking of the hype machine begins. "It's so powerful, it can render 8 gazillion polygons on screen at once and make poverty history whilst curing cancer"

  • OxWearingSocks #7 10 months ago

    I hope the games for it aren't predictable 3D pap like Avatar though...

  • Harmonica #8 10 months ago

    I remember when the benchmark for games visuals was the Final Fantasy film and we haven't even really got there yet.

    *feels old*

  • Dizzy #9 10 months ago

    While this claim is obviously bullshit, it does seem to indicate that MS is going for a power console and not some casual 360 upgrade.

  • TheEarlOfZinger #10 10 months ago

    Hilarious

  • jamhead #11 10 months ago

    Here we go again!

    Avatar like gfx my brown eye.

    How about 1080p/60fps and properly destructible scenery with no slowdown then we might just about have lived up to the hype of the last 'next gen'.

  • Ultrasoundwave #12 10 months ago

    Ill believe it when i see it.

    I just hope that everyone remembers to focus on good stories and gameplay for the next gen too. Graphics arent everything!!

  • PixelPirate #13 10 months ago

    no it wont.

    what a load of crap.

  • Kaonazhie #14 10 months ago

    It might have Lord of the Rights level visuals, but not Avatar. The way I see it, console graphics are generally ten years behind movies.

  • inutaihanyou #15 10 months ago

    Since its AMD saying it, i'll give them the benefit of a doubt. Hopefully the heating issues and whatnot have been worked out.

    I would laugh at anyone else saying that next console gen will have CGI graphics, but not the tech company itself. That unreal demo was working on 3 GTX580's. Only one of the soon to be released ATI cards could run that amount of power, based only on the specs involved.

    Again, because AMD is saying it, i'll give them a benefit of a doubt

  • ubergine #16 10 months ago

    They were probably referring to the Avatar game. So the nexBox will be the same hardware with some kind of Wii Remote knock-off.

  • dr_shambles #17 10 months ago

    Graphical horsepower is all well and good, but is anyone thinking about gameplay these days?

  • bf #18 10 months ago

    And still Tetris is a really good game.

  • The-Jack-Burton #19 10 months ago

    if that is the case, then the number of so-called coding gods, just went from 50 to 5, and the price of a game just went from 60 to 100+

  • menage #20 10 months ago

    I hated Avatar

    runs

  • bluetoothion #21 10 months ago

    He said reproducing which sounds like able to render real time but not in actual game play conditions... so i register it with yet to be proven and not likely to happen statement the XIII versus would be on par to Advent children.... moving on peeps we can only hope and only wait with what the next gen will be par with.

    i find it depressing to use the ''on par'' phrase we can see where technology has reached and how much we have to wait for it to become affordable, waiting two more years for something to be supposedly on par with something created two years back...its a serious gap.

  • dagas #22 10 months ago

    Ah yes the good old "graphics will be so powerful it will look as good as movie X". I remember GeForce 2 (or maybe GF3) saying it could look as good as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Ten years after that movie I still don't think we are quite there even if we are getting close.
    Edited by dagas at 18/07/11 @ 09:02

  • Buran #23 10 months ago

    Yeah, PS2 Toy Story graphics, all over my face! Lol.

  • Eraser #24 10 months ago

    Didn't Sony say pretty much the same thing about Playstation 2?

  • Whitster #25 10 months ago

    Doe's anyone else wish they'd just spend more time on this gen refining the gameplay and their writing/story telling skills rather than rush out a new console which will likley spend it's first year or two playing host to games intended for the 360 but moved over at the last moment or lazy PS3/WiiU ports.

  • jumpdeveraux #26 10 months ago

    Having the horsepower for better physics/AI is one thing. Executing good physics/AI is another thing entirely.

    Just playing GTA4 again as never got around to finishing it - damn is that game better with one of the vehicle handling mods installed so a family saloon doesn't feel like it weighs 10 tons and rolls over when a child farts on the pavement as you drive past. That's poor tuning affecting gameplay not lack of physics grunt.

  • Buran #27 10 months ago

    On a side note: why EG keeps using the Epic's Samaritan Tech Demo as example of future visual quality when Battlefield 3 looks way better running in a single GTX 580 isntead of a Tri-SLI GTX 580?

    Is a bit absurd due next gen of consoles wil not match a Triple GTX 580 configuration, and at the same time is absurd to do it if other engines provide better results with a ton less power required.l

  • George-Roper #28 10 months ago

    LOL! :D

  • rudedudejude #29 10 months ago

    Every pedestrian an individual mentality eh?

    So one might tell me to fuck off, while other says piss off?

    Hmmm... can't wait!

  • Eoin #30 10 months ago

    Yeah, PS2 Toy Story graphics, all over my face! Lol.

    For all the hype that Sony built up about the PS2 and its power, they never actually said that it could do Toy Story graphics.

    For the record, that was Microsoft, talking about the original Xbox.

  • effinjamie #31 10 months ago

    So sticking with AMD, means we can expect full backwards comparability then?

  • monsieur_qwerty #32 10 months ago

    @djronz

    Your choice of movies aside, it was a reference to ingame graphics. Something that has only (kind of) been achieved by something like Infamous 2 - at a stretch.

    As for the sods who neg me, face it, you spend too much on consoles that go out of fashion as soon as they achieve the potential they were meant to. Unless your chavs who nick everything you own. Oh well, time to trade in my Xbox 360 whilst I can get a good price.

  • SenkaSek #33 10 months ago

    @Buran

    Samaritan Tech Demo shows what is possible with current (2011) technology. And no Battlefield 3 does not look better. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j27btQnnows

  • sourc0r #34 10 months ago

    lies

  • Stuz359 #35 10 months ago

    In terms of polygon throughput? Maybe. In terms of rendering quality? Not a chance.

  • MENTAL1ST Verified Senior Software Engineer, Picsel UK Ltd. #36 10 months ago

    Avatar's CG is not necessarily all that special. What's special about Avatar is the success of its performance capture, combined with the artistry of its facial animators, and the effectiveness of the integration of CG and live footage.

    None of that is likely to be showing up in games, but if you look at the various effects company showreels on the Blu Ray bonus features, all the mechs and dropships and stuff, even the jungle and creatures aren't necessarily all that difficult to replicate - I've always thought those dog-things looked very videogame-y.

  • 3william56 #37 10 months ago

    ... at 1 frame per year...?

    Jeez - Jimbo Cameron is probably feeling pretty daft right now splashing out million$ on all those fancy render farms when he could have just used a Nextbox...

    All we need now is a 10 year development time and half a billion $ budget per game and we're sorted.

    Personally I just want 10x horse armour and even more massive damage to crabs.

  • Bagpuss #38 10 months ago

    So they are going to fit a 32,000 CPU core render farm (which is what Avatar used to render its Gfx) into a shoe box sized console by 2013?...

    I lol'd.....alot.

    Oh and by the way..even with 32k Cpu cores, individual frames still took hours to render in some cases...
    Edited by Bagpuss at 18/07/11 @ 10:05

  • HyperTails #39 10 months ago

    Can we expect Avatar sized budgets as well?

    Seriously, they think we're fools?

  • arcam #40 10 months ago

    even the jungle and creatures aren't necessarily all that difficult to replicate

    Maybe not as an image or pre-rendered video, but they are impossible to replicate in real-time on a home computer.

    This is article is stupid, it's the kind of thing the non-specialist media say, EG should know better.

  • kinth #41 10 months ago

    If it can't be done on PC yet, it's definately not going to happen on a console.

  • UltimateGold #42 10 months ago

    You'll want us to believe that microsoft have the best first party line up as well....mmmmm loonies week out me thinks

  • Gumersindo #43 10 months ago

    Hard to believe isn't it?.

    More Blahs to the hype bonfire

  • Eighthours #44 10 months ago

    What a load of utter fucking rubbish. So it's a render farm in a box, but not just a render farm - it's capable of rendering Avatar stuff in real time. Like fuck it is. What a fucking ridiculous statement. It completely insults our intelligence.

  • Darren #45 10 months ago

    Yeah right, AMD, I'm sure the next Xbox will be capable of Avatar quality graphics if you mean it'll finally have a Blu-ray drive capable of playing the full quality 1080/24p version of the movie, which is vastly superior to the bitrate compromised digital download version!!! ;)

    Seriously though, the next Xbox will be based on current DX11 PC graphics technology (likely the NVIDIA GTX 560 or AMD HD6870 albeit die-shrunk several times from the original chips to reduce power consumption and heat) so by the time it arrives it'll already have been succeeded by newer technology on the PC that is several times more powerful. I doubt that even such a PC of that time will be capable of rendering Avatar visuals in real-time either for games so the consoles certainly won't. Maybe in ten years time they will but the next Xbox will released long before then.

    Anyway, we'll see how true AMD's claims really are. Personally, I'll take it to mean that next gen games will finally be free of hideous screen tearing, framerate issues and jaggies since I didn't recall seeing any of those issues in Avatar! :p

  • L0cky #46 10 months ago

    @Harmonica

    You're right. You made me go and have a look though, and I was surprised at how similar the visuals of FF: The Spirits Within are to Mass Effect.

    For example, if you released this shot as Mass Effect 3, it wouldn't look out of place at all.

    The biggest visual difference between ME and the FF movie is the characters' hair.

    So, in rough terms; consoles that are 5/6 years old are almost capable of matching pre rendered that's 10 years old. But it takes developers about 4 years to squeeze it out of the hardware. Therefore, my very unscientific calculations say we can look at movies made today, and expect those kind of visuals on the latest console generation in 8 years.

    My guess: Almost Avatar level visuals towards the end of the next generation's prime; so maybe this guy is right.

  • solidSnake04 #47 10 months ago

    @octo
    You made my day :)

  • RobTheBuilder #48 10 months ago

    @monsieur_qwerty

    You complain about Microsoft making unrealistic projections, then proceed to make completely baseless predictions on a product that hasn't even been designed yet.

  • dutzan #49 10 months ago

    From Wiki:
    "To render Avatar, Weta used a 10,000 sq ft (930 m2) server farm making use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores running Ubuntu Linux and the Grid Engine cluster manager. The render farm occupies the 193rd to 197th spots in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. A new texturing and paint software system called Mari, was developed by The Foundry in cooperation with Weta. Creating the Na'vi characters and the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage, and each minute of the final footage for Avatar occupies 17.28 gigabytes of storage."

    They're really going to put that kind of power into a small device the size of a console? I don't care who said it, it just ain't going to happen in the next few years. And like many have said, the development costs to make full use of such hardware will be seriously prohibitive.

    Of course if this would be true, James Cameron wouldn't need such a huge budget for his next avatar film, he'd just spring for an xbox and voila!
    Edited by dutzan at 18/07/11 @ 11:27

  • monsieur_qwerty #50 10 months ago

    @knobthebuilder

    Its not just MS but the industry as a whole. More knowldegeable folk have commented on how this claim is pure BS and EG felt like reporting it. Journalism? No just more mindless PR. But hey, who cares right?

  • Porcupine_I #51 10 months ago

    yay! the best looking games ever with 30 minutes of gameplay! :-D

  • matster361 #52 10 months ago

    it will also have a dyson airblade just to cool the gpu lol

  • Syrette #53 10 months ago

    Shame we'll be playing them with Kinect.

  • TechnicPuppet #54 10 months ago

    Are actual gameplay graphics even on a par with Toy Story yet from 1995? Cut scenes are a different story.

  • DiamondIce #55 10 months ago

    The AI and physics parts are those I give a damn about. Some moody git having a smoke in the rain looking all moody isn't so important.

  • RobTheBuilder #56 10 months ago

    @monsieur_qwerty

    Seriously? A name pisstake? What are you, seven?

    I don't know if you get how news works, someone says something, it gets reported.
    There aren't many reliable calls on where the future is going, but AMD are likely to be as accurate as anyone given they make the processors and graphics chips.

    Also. I recall that when Antz was made it took a huge computer a day to render one frame. A few years later a set of PS2 CPU's in sync could render it in real time. It won't be AS good as the film, but clearly this is a marker they are aiming towards.

  • Quak #57 10 months ago

    Will Sony's claims of 1080p 120fps be real next time round then?

  • monsieur_qwerty #58 10 months ago

    @SnobTheBuilder

    Calm down dear. All I want are better games that are fully utilising hardware not an expensive update that makes me feel like a mug. PC gaming is pressing ahead in leaps and bounds, its just a shame the community isnt as big as console gaming. If MS can pull it off then it doesnt mean that gaming will improve.

  • des #59 10 months ago

    CG people am cry

    Technically they can't match it but i bet that majority won't care or see the difference without pixel counters.
    Edited by des at 18/07/11 @ 11:53

  • mooseti #60 10 months ago

    Wasn't the PS2 supposed to have "Toy Story visuals"?

  • vizzini #61 10 months ago

    @L0cky
    Although I see what you are saying, the image you linked isn't representative of the film's normal visuals when watching on HD download or Blu-ray; like I did recently in PSN's welcome back for free. The biggest difference is the levels of sub division, sub surface light scattering(for skin), the animation and the hair, true HDR lighting, indirect lighting and shadow softness.

    imo Spirits within is still visual stunning for cgi(and visually superior than the newer, but also good Resident Evil: Degeneration cgi film offered in the Welcome back) and both visibly superior to Epic's demo.

    But on topic, PC or console graphics at Degeneration's level would be quite some feat still, which I'm sure can be achieved today on a modest sized render farm of Cell's (PS3 linux boxes) in real-time. But even if next generation does go ray-tracing, they need to aim lower than that. Slight better fidelity world modelling than this generation, but photon/ray-traced at 720p60 will still be an amazing step up imo.

  • coolbritannia #62 10 months ago

    Looking at Perfect Dark Zero, and comparing that to Gears 3, Uncharted 2, Crysis 2, Battlefield 3, I think the nextbox could have something approaching Avatar level graphics by the end of its life.

    This isn't as much of a stretch as Toy Story PS2 graphics or the emotion engine launching space shuttles.

  • 32768Colours #63 10 months ago

    the unannounced console will allow developers to make every pedestrian in a game such as Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row have a totally individual mentality so they react to the player in different ways.

    Or more likely, they'll make the cars shinier.

    The day developers start putting AI before graphics will be the day that there is literally nowhere else to go visually. Given that even Avatar is unlikely to be the high water mark for graphics, I think we've got a way to go yet.

  • Slikz #64 10 months ago

    AMD mean business - I should know because I have an overclocked Asus 5870.

  • L0cky #65 10 months ago

    @vizzini
    You're right of course; it's pretty much why I added the caveat "almost".

    The big differences between CG film and real time are the techniques used. With CG you can afford to do things 'properly', with accurate HDR and lighting and shadow models. The goal of the engineers who write the renderers is accuracy. Render time barely comes into it.

    In real time you have to pull as many tricks as you can to make something look ~90% right. Under the hood it's best guessing, and making trade-offs at every opportunity. Unlike CG, the goal is to make it look as accurate as possible, within a crazily tiny amount of time.

    For that reason, real time will never be exactly like CG film; because it would be wasteful. If getting the lighting 95% right can be done in .33ms, but getting it 100% right takes 5 minutes, or 1000x the processing power, then it isn't a trade off that will ever make sense.

    As des inferred; you couldn't do the FF movie precisely in real time, but you could perhaps make it look close enough for most people.

  • Uncompetative #66 10 months ago

    I just want to stop having to swap discs!

  • Ternon #67 10 months ago

    "Last month id Software programming legend John Carmack told Eurogamer the next generation of consoles will be ten times as powerful as the current generation. "

    In other words, on the same level as today's high-end PC.
    We already knew that.

  • Darren #68 10 months ago

    @Slitz - Yeah, so did I (two actually) but it's a fairly shitty first-gen DX11 card with weak DX11 tessellation and mediocre AMD drivers. :p

  • dunbain #69 10 months ago

    Do we even want this? What are devs going to do with the extra horsepower? I mean, seriously, who can make games other than the big 5 pubs?

    Every time news like this pops up, my heart sinks a little bit more.

  • RobTheBuilder #70 10 months ago

    @mooseti To be fair, even PS3 struggles to do what they said Ps2 could do!

  • Ternon #71 10 months ago

    BTW, this is a pretty stupid comment since games still don't look like that animated and very old Final Fantasy movie.

    And games will still not look like that old Final Fantasy movie, let alone Avatar.

  • Ternon #72 10 months ago

    BTW, this is a pretty stupid comment since games still don't look like that animated and very old Final Fantasy movie.

    And games will still not look like that old Final Fantasy movie, let alone Avatar.

  • vizzini #73 10 months ago

    @L0cky

    I agree with what you are saying about the diminishing returns of getting it perfect in real-time as a trade off, but that will also be true; even of console photon/ray tracing (lower number of bounces) compared to cgi(and that compared to nature).

    The main differences, is that in current console techniques you need a lot less (cheap) computing power and more expensive software engineers and artists to fake things to 75% of entry level photon/ray tracing using rasterization.

    Eventually I expect hardware to catch up, where the financial equation will shift so that game development will use the fast & cheap computing power of the day, but with fewer engineers(because photon/ray-tracing will be relatively generic and recursive) freeing the same number of artists/designers from tweaking and faking things, to refocus fully on populating those game worlds with assets and gameplay.

    Even if the computation equipment cost twice as much for photon/ray-tracing now, the cost of wages is the expensive part of game development, and anything that can keep team sizes from growing or reducing, while increasing production is likely to get green lit quite quickly imo.

  • Gearskin #74 10 months ago

    Technically capable, but not achievable in most cases. Small teams, budget constraints etc

  • Deinsleaf #75 10 months ago

    It's all good in paper. But what you claim remains to be seen.

  • mrblonde #76 10 months ago

    Msoft undersold the power of the 360 this generation, as the 360 still seems effortlessly able to match or out perform almost every title released in the last 5 years .
    They have never bragged about their consoles power that much, this is a Sony trait first over hyping the ps2 and then the ps3 hype, which has left many gamers disappointed with the 30 fps and 720p games most console titles produce this generation.
    Edited by mrblonde at 18/07/11 @ 14:34

  • Slikz #77 10 months ago

    @Darren - Don't agree with you on this one I doubt you had the same card as me. I run near enough everything maxed out at 1080 with no issues.

    Crysis 2 DX11 mostly ultra settings, Crysis 1 same, GTA 4 mostly ultra settings, Shogun 2 maxed, Starcraft 2 maxed, COD maxed, BF2 maxed, Batman maxed, SSF4: AE maxed, Portal 2 maxed. Metro 2033 mostly maxed without tessellation.

  • Quixz #78 10 months ago

    This is great news, it seems that they are aiming high!

    I love new stuff!

  • mcreddie #79 10 months ago

    I don't it's so much graphics or AI that needs to be massively improved, but fluid animations in all the characters. I felt that's one focal point they left out of most games this generation but really makes a difference when done well.

  • Negotiator1 #80 10 months ago

    When epic came out a number of months ago with a video claiming that's what the next gen graphics will look out, and I said it is impossible at the moment to predict the level of graphics the next gen consoles will be capable of. This article proves it, when someone from AMD says this it can't be disputed because if any one knows where game graphics are going its these guys.

  • darth_paul #81 10 months ago

    funny... I remember well that, when this current generation arrived, developers where also raving about the unlimited capabilities in terms of AI... how more inteligent the NPC's would act... and now, go, figure, they're after all dumb as hell (read: as the last Gen)... and the next gen is going to blow our minds.

    maybe im just a cynic, but developers/exec's are usually always daydreaming and blowing their own trumpet... so, this kind of speech usually goes unnoticed.

    Please, everyone remember this: the next Xbox3/PS4 will be based on tech that is about to be released on the PC (yup), and I can tell you its not that mindblowing. Its just a graphical evolution. It wont be "Alien tech from the future"... and from what im seeing, Avatar's visuals will not be possible on home-machines in the near future. keep dreaming

  • captainCandy #82 10 months ago

    So the next XBox will have a BluRay drive!? Also, about that AI stuff, they could do it today, even on Wii, just by scaling down the graphics a little bit.

  • Pehmu #83 10 months ago

    Anyone who believes this raise your hand.

    Didn't think so.

  • BonzoBanana #84 10 months ago

    Considering the next xbox will probably be here by 2013 we probably already have greater peformance available today in a top end pc using the best components. The next xbox probably won't achieve that technology due to cost restraints but the fact the code can be optimised for specific hardware with a console means it will punch above the performance of the same pc hardware.

    Wouldn't surprise me if the next Xbox was 10x the power of the current model thats quite reasonable. I'm expecting Sony to deliver a less powerful console next time around, something smaller, more stylish and lower cost. Probably sitting in the middle of Wii U performance and next Xbox performance.

    It seems as technology progresses less and less games make full use of the technology available. In the days of the super nintendo and megadrive most games near enough maxed out the hardware but with the 32bit 3D consoles a greater percentage of games didn't require full performance. Now with small downloadable games often a huge percentage of games just don't use the hardware much at all.

    Often the most powerful console gets overlooked too. In the time of the xbox, gamecube and ps2 many xbox games were little better than ps2 and gamecube versions because the games were written with the weakest platform in mind so the game engine would run on ps2.

    Nintendo have shown repeatedly that consumers aren't obsessed with power. Their DS models, wii, 3DS and probably Wii U are underpowered designs and generally sell in huge numbers.

    Sony basically screwed themselves this generation with the ps3. They probably could have made a lot more money if they'd actually produced a console somewhere between wii and 360 in power. Instead they produced something far too ambitious and expensive and have come last this generation so far because they couldn't compete on price.

    The point is next generation will be scaled back and while I feel Microsoft will push the technology more than anyone it will still be far less ambitious than their earlier designs.

    If Microsoft produce an expensive bulky console capable of very high performance they will probably fail next generation. They should aim for the right price point and max out the hardware for that price point and not go beyond it. If that means 4-6x performance instead of 10-12x performance then they should go with 4-6x performance.

    A good launch price for a console in the uk is about £250 and then within a reasonable time they can get to £199 and then below that for the main lifetime of the console.

  • Buran #85 10 months ago

    @SenkaSek:

    No. The Samaritan Tech Demo shows barely half dozen of characters in a small environment made of adamantium, not-interactive environments, in a scripted sequence with laughlable facial animations. Battlefield 3 moves 64 players for ground, sea and air in huge, fully destructible environments with better animations, and you can bet that isn't limited to 30 fps cutscenes, but solid 60 fps with a single GPU configurations.

    In fact Samaritan Tech Demo doesn't show any new for the market: Bokeh deep of field? CryEngine checked. Subsurface scattering? CryEngine checked. Tessellation? CryEngine checked. Reflections with shadows, parrallax mapping, soft shadows? CryEngine checked... all of them currently in Crysis 2. And Frostbite 2.0 looks and moves even better than CE3 or UE 3.975

  • waynenot #86 10 months ago

    It will cost less than £400 and will categorically not feature anything of the sort. Fucking idiotic drivel of the first order.

  • WillTheSecond #87 10 months ago

    No... just... no...

    An individual frame of Avatar took up to 2 days to render. ONE frame. On a render farm. To say that current PC technology can do in realtime what the most technologically advanced filmmakers need months to do is absurd.

    Also lets think... most current gen games are 30fps 720p, next gen you'll probably want 1080p as standard and hopefully 60fps as well... twice the res X times the framerate. Four times the data. Then double that with 3D. Eight times the data. Not much overhead if you're working with hardware ten times that of current gen and you're looking to create Avatar.

  • attep #88 10 months ago

    Now i am sure it will not happen, but imagine they scale back the graphics on a game on the new console, it would look like Mass Effect 3 in the GTA4 universe and have the facial range of LA Noire with truely next gen AI. That would be awesome, but the next gen consoles will push huge graphical leaps and that probably won't happen. Do i mind, yes and no, i will buy Microsfts and Sonys new machines when they come out and to be honest i know that i am going to love them.
    @ Bozo
    In terms of pricing, you pay for what you get. It's why i bought a Wii, decided it was only a novelty and not one that grabbed me so i have always been much happier with the "hardcore gamers" machines and this will not change so i woul drather pay more and get the jump rather than a novelty unit with games aimed at children and non gamers.

    Oh and rememer the SNES that was over £300 when it was released. And that was then.

  • ThePissartist #89 10 months ago

    @Harmonica

    I remember when a graphics benchmark was 16 colours.

  • L0cky #90 10 months ago

    @vizzini

    Interesting point about the cost of artists going down as realism increases; with them spending less time trying to fake realism. Though that might be taken up again by the expectancy of higher fidelity in the unreal stuff; such as architecture, and character design.

    Change of topic: I can't see AI improving all that much, no matter how much power is available.

    AI doesn't sell a game anywhere near as well as graphics do, because it's not so immediate. Therefore, the investment isn't and hasn't been there from devs/publishers. So there aren't any out of the box solutions that you can just throw more resources at and get 'more AI'.

    Like 32768Colours said, until graphics reach some kind of ceiling AI isn't going to improve much. At least not unless some independent comes up with some kind of AI engine they can license out; like PhysX/Havok do for physics. I can't really think how you'd even make such a thing though.

  • BlinkeredAxis #91 10 months ago

    I'd rather games were like Bladerunner than Avatar.

  • CamberGreber #92 10 months ago

    "gamers should expect radical improvements to AI and physics. "

    Dont you mean - gamers WILL expect radical improvments to AI and pysics.

  • CamberGreber #93 10 months ago

    AI will never be fixed this decade because NOT EVEN the Fastest Supercomputers in the world can produce Real AI.

    The Technology isnt there yet neither the Software or the understanding of how the human brain really works has been cracked yet.

    What you see in Games is just FakeI not AI.



    PS. What they need to work on other than animation is Clothing and Hair Physics.
    but once again the Software isnt there yet.
    (even in offline rendering for movies the cloth/hair physics have to be manually tweaked by humans or else they crash or glitch out.) :(

  • spekkeh #94 10 months ago

    Not too excited by this news, a new arms race just means you'll have to buy all three consoles again, but what's worse is that in the end we'll be left with only EA, Ubi, Activision, Nintendo and Sony that have enough money to create games, that will be even more similar to each other than they are now.