Technology company AMD (supplier of graphics hardware for the Xbox 360) is claiming that the Xbox 360's successor will be capable of producing the kind of visual detail seen in James Cameron's Avatar, as reported on examiner.com via the August issue of Official Xbox Magazine US.
Cramming the kind of technology it took to render every frame of the eyeball-searing Avatar into a console within the next year or so sounds impossible, but AMD is claiming the next Xbox will launch with this within reach.
AMD would not confirm it was actually working on the next Xbox but director of ISV relationships at AMD, Neal Robison, has said that gamers have a lot to be excited about. Beyond visual fidelity Robison claims that the AI and physics capabilities of the next generation will allow for every pedestrian in an open-world title like GTA or Saints Row to be an individual character with a unique personality. This would mean NPCs would react in a whole host of new and different ways to in-game actions.
Of course, this is far from the first time this sort of hyperbole has been tossed out into the public. Gamers have been teased with promises of Toy Story graphics for the PS2 and Toy Story 2 graphics for the original Xbox before.
[/i]
We shall see
Well, I guess it would depend upon
where this detail is seen during the game. Cut scenes? Yeah, that's entirely possible. Pre-fabricated animations that occur during the course of the game and do not rely upon current actions within the gameplay? Definitely.
But that type of detail throughout the entire game? Making the entire game look like a movie of Avatar proportions? Probably not.
Your average blu-ray movie is on a dual layer disc. Some shorter movies may be on single layer discs, but because a movie is between 20GB to 40GB for blu-ray quality, they usually require the dual layer discs. These discs hold up to 50GB of data, so it would seem like you can't have the visual quality of a movie
and the complexity of game programming on one disc.
But blu-ray was made to be future proof. I'm not sure how many layers they've successfully tested, but the purpose behind the blu-ray disc was to allow the number of disc layers to increase over the years. Of course, this would require that players be updated to read three layer, four layer, etc. discs, but the room for expansion is there. When blu-ray was created, it was suggested that creating multi-layer discs with capacities of 100GB to 200GB would be easily attainable.
So as far as being able to store the data required for the complex programming and the in-depth visuals, that is already a possibility. This assumes, of course, that the new XBox is switching to blu-ray game discs, and that they're going to use multi-layer discs that have yet to be seen. If they're not switching to blu-ray discs for games, then I don't see how they're going to get that type of quality, because I don't think they're going to have enough storage space for high quality graphics and intense programming.
The biggest hurdle is going to be the processing speed to keep up with all of this. I don't know what kind of fucking HAL 9000 shit AMD has cooked up, but they're claiming it's awesome. I doubt it will work as they claim, because for those types of graphics in actual gameplay, they would have to be rendered as you played. And rendering Avatar'esque graphics took quite a lot. I think an article I read awhile back stated that 40 computers and thousands of CPUs were used just to render the movie. You can't fit that type of processing power into a gaming console, at least not right now.
So, my assumption is that the cut scenes and some in-game static animations will be of Avatar quality. I don't think they'll be able to render characters and scenery throughout gameplay with that level of detail.
112 Replies
25376 Views