Rare: ‘I don’t think 360 has reached its limit’
Over at Develop ‘08 in Brighton last week, Nick Burton, a sneior softwre engineer at Rare, has stated that the Xbox 360 has not yet reached it’s limits.
“You never can push them as far as they can go. The reality of the peak performance of the console is yes, you could look to a generation beyond where we are now and think, yeah, I could use that power. But the reality is in 360 and the PS3 and the latest generation PC graphics, the amount of power in the GPUs is such that you’re more bound by your creativity and the aesthetic you’re going for than you’re really bound by polygon pushing power,” said Burton. “You’re probably actually more bound maybe by art authoring and the amount of data throughput that, just the amount of memory you’d need, but I don’t think 360 has reached its limit.”
Burton noted that he is able to do things with the Xbox 360 that he was not able to do at the start of this generation.
“If you see some of the stuff we’ve done, in fact some of the stuff our guys have done, the GPU particle systems and things like, some of our guys have been working on the geometric style real time radiosity,” explained Burton. “Even at the start of this generation, if you’d said to me, without actually me just looking at it and you were asking me off the cuff as a graphics programmer, could that happen, I’d have said no. And then you think, well, what’s going to come next? You can still keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it.”
08.5.08 (
8:00 pm |
This is why I don’t like PC gaming because their lifecycle is normally only 2 or so years. Worse yet within that time there will only be like 2 or 3 games that take advantage of the technology in that card. Meanwhile developers are working on the next big thing that will require yet another graphics card, new motherboard, expanded memory, a wind machine and a river of ice-cold water running through it to keep the CPU from burning a hole into itself.
I’m sure if developers actually cared they could probably squeeze PS3 like visuals out of the PS2 but when you’re expecting by both the public and investors to get games out in 9 to 12 months no one has the time to really dig into the complexities of the console.
And while Sony is planning for a 10-year lifecycle with the PS3 there’s almost every chance that most developers would’ve moved onto the PS4.
Let’s just hope that all this untapped power in both systems see the light of day before developers are forced to move onto each systems’ successor.