Next Gen Rumors Abound
Over the last year or so, you've probably seen one or more rumors about the kind of hardware that will go into the next generation of consoles Microsoft and Sony are making. Admittedly, the Wii U was announced almost a year ago and we still don't even know what hardware's in that, but it's important to point out that all of these rumors, when you add them together, start to coalesce into something that just makes sense. Let's talk below, shall we?
First: the next generation of consoles won't be as powerful on paper as PCs you can build today. We're not going to see CPUs as powerful as Intel's latest Sandy Bridge chips, we won't see 8GB of RAM as standard, and we certainly won't see today's $500 video cards dropped into these new consoles. It takes about $1000 to build a PC with a reasonable selection of the latest not-top-of-the-line parts, and while MS and Sony will get discounts on those parts, it won't be that much.
But what consoles can do that PCs can't is offer a very stable baseline of performance, a known amount of horsepower (without background programs sapping it) that they can write for. This generally means that console developers can do more with this hardware than they can with the same hardware attached to Windows 7, but even then, don't expect a machine that makes PC gamers cry with envy. Last generation, the three-core CPU in the 360 and the Cell CPU in the PS3 were actually pretty advanced hardware, but I see something a little closer to off-the-shelf coming down from IBM for the next consoles.
Those looking for 60fps gaming at 1080p might get it in this next gen - after all, a handful of games already do it on the current gen (Gran Turismo included, if you allow for some resolution "tweaks" to keep the game running at 60 frames). I can see 2 or 3GB being the standard for RAM, but I wouldn't expect much more, and the GPU will not likely be a scaled down version of the generation that's out now from AMD and coming soon from nVidia. I'd expect an existing generation's chips to be the basis for both consoles' GPUs.
All that said, the next generation of console will certainly wow us, because it allows developers to work with a baseline amount of horsepower, and the great art and design they can put together in a game engine will just be objectively better. Higher resolution textures, better special effects, higher polygon counts. Those developers that are already delivering amazing visuals with the current gen will do exceedingly well in the next.
The bigger question is when, and I am pretty sure that neither MS and Sony are ready to get back to the very unprofitable ways of trying to introduce a new console, which costs billions and leaves everyone involved - including gamers, expected to buy expensive hardware to keep up with the times - a little poorer. End of 2013 for the next generation? I'd say that's likely at the very least, but I wouldn't put it past one of the two companies to actually wait even longer.
