PlayStation4: Sooner than later? Before the Next Xbox? Carmack thinks so!

[parallaxscroll]

I for one have never believed Sony intended to wait until 2016 to launch PS4. The drumbeat that PS3 would last ten years is really no different than the PS1 & PS2 lasting ten years. Doesn't mean the next-gen console doesn't launch long before the tenth year.

Anyway, I completely agree with Carmark on everything except Digital Distribution. I think he is right on the money regarding hardware/generational leaps and architecture, including the probability that next-gen consoles will be based on Larrabee or Larrabee-like hardware.



http://ps3.ign.com/articles/101/1012811p1.html
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...gen-blog-entry
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/35344/Carm...irst-to-market
http://www.pcworld.com/article/17000...box_next.html/
http://www.examiner.com/x-12491-Dall...tion-too-quick
http://www.geek.com/articles/games/j...xbox-20090811/
http://www.psxextreme.com/ps3-news/5611.html

"I have a good sense of where technology is going but larger things about what businesses choose to do and big businesses like Microsoft and Sony... those are decisions above my pay grade and not really in my line of business, or what I think about a lot," Carmack says. "I think that Xbox Live... the advent of that and the App Store with the iPhone are wonderful signs of the future of digital distribution. I think there's a decent chance that one of the next gen consoles will be without optical media... the uptake rates of people who have broadband connects surprised everyone this generation. It's higher than what the core publishers and even the first party people expected."

Carmack goes on to talk about how he believes that one or the other of the major HD console-makers will jump the gun with the leap to the next generation (hinting that it will be Sony), but in common with many other developers believes that their best interests are served by prolonging the lifespan of the current consoles.

"The whole jockeying for who's going to release the first next gen console is very interesting and pretty divorced from the technical side of things," he says. "Whether Sony wants to jump the gun to prevent the same sort of 360 lag from happening to them again seems likely. As developers, we would really like to see this generation stretch as long as possible. We'd like to see it be quite a few more years before the next gen console comes out, but I suspect one will end up shipping something earlier rather than later."

The general roadmap for the next gen architectures has already been laid down though, and the future appears to be all about variations of Intel's Larrabee proposition, where many tiny, fully programmable cores combine to form one powerful chip that may well work as both CPU and GPU.

"We do have a very good sense of where the technology is going because we talk to NVIDIA, we talk to Intel, we talk to ATI/AMD and they're all pursuing variations on massive multi-core processor integration," Carmack says, "There's lots of interesting things about that, about how we need to think about things on the game development side to take advantage of that."

Real-time ray-tracing has often been seen as the holy grail of graphics rendering and simply unobtainable with the levels of technology we have available, but it may well find a place within the next gen consoles.

"The big question is, are we going to be able to do a ray-casting primitive for a lot of things?" he ponders. "Certainly we'll still be doing a lot of conventional stuff like animated characters and things like that very likely will be drawn not incredibly differently from how they're drawn now. Hopefully we'll be able to use some form of sparse voxel octree representation cast stuff for some of the things in the world that are gonna be rigid-bodied... maybe we'll have deformations on things like that. But that's a research project I'm excited to get back to in the relatively near future. We can prototype that stuff now on current hardware and if we're thinking that... this type of thing will be ten times faster on the hardware that ends up shipping, we'll be able to learn a lot from that."

However, while he predicts that the leaps in cutting edge console technology are set to continue (certainly there is no hint from him that Microsoft or Sony will follow a Wii-style strategy of simply adding minor or incremental upgrades to their existing hardware), we are swiftly reaching the point where platform holders will be unable to win their battles against the laws of physics.

"We talk about these absurd things like how many teraflops of processing and memory that are going into our game machines," Carmack says, speculating off-hand that the next gen consoles will have at least 2GB of internal RAM. "It's great and there's going to be at least another generation like that, although interestingly we are coasting towards some fundamental physical limits on things. We've already hit the megahertz wall and eventually there's going to be a power density wall from which you won't get more processing out there..."

That being the case, he speculates that the game-makers could move into different directions to provide new game experiences and at that point, the almost mythical cloud computing concept could make an impact.

"There'll be questions of whether we shift to a cloud computing infrastructure... lots of interesting questions about whether you have the computing power in your living room versus somewhere else," he says, noting that while latency is a fundamental issue, the sheer scope of storage available online opens up intriguing possibilities. "Certainly the easier aspect of that is 'net as storage' where it's all digital distribution and you could wind up doing an idTech 5-like thing... and blow it up to World of Warcraft size so you need a hundred petabytes of storage in your central game system. We can do that now! It's not an absurd thing to talk about. Games are already in the tens of millions of dollars in terms of budget size and that's probably going to continue to climb there. The idea of putting millions of dollars into higher-sized storage... it's not unreasonable to at least consider."

Returning to the concept of the next generation console, John Carmack is already planning to take advantage of the new hardware and is planning to have systems in place to ensure that a sneaky pre-emptive launch from one of the platform holders won't catch id software by surprise.

"What I'm planning to do is set up a new rendering engine that co-exists with the current one... and I intend to develop it like that, so you have an idTech 5 version and then have everything working the same [with] an alternate data set that you can render with a different version," he revealed. "So the hope would be that if we do get some flashy new graphics hardware on there that we would possibly have the option of releasing a game cross-generational like that. Same game, same design across everything but different media set, different rendering engine... That also allows me to work on something without having to involve the entire team. That's something where we can take a couple of people, go out, work on prototyping proof of concepts while the rest of the company is building the production titles."

Carmack on next-gen consoles in general (3rd video)
http://www.cdaction.pl/news-7673/joh...-software.html

[Joe Redifer]

Usually the loser of any given console generation is the first to jump the gun on the next generation. Then there is Nintendo. No matter what happens, they will always release last.

[j_factor]

I think all three will come out around the same time.

And what's all this crap about digital distribution? A digital-only console would have zero interest from me.

[parallaxscroll]

Yeah the loser of a generation is usually the one to jumpstart the following generation, and Nintendo is almost always last.

Although... Nintendo launched the Famicom/NES first in both Japan and the U.S. before Sega came out with the Mark III / Master System.

Anyway, I don't expect a new console from anyone for at least the next 2 years. Fall 2011 would be the earliest possible date for any next-gen console, and I think fall 2012 is significantly more likely. By fall 2012 the Xbox360 will have been on the market for 7 years, and the PS3 & Wii for 6. I'd say that would be a good time for next-gen to start. That would also mean this gen lasts for roughly 1 year longer overall than last gen, before a new cycle of consoles.

Not to say that 360/PS3/Wii won't be sold for years after the new systems come out. More likely though, PS3 will get phased out like Xbox1 and Gamecube did, replaced completely with PS4, while 360 & Wii remain on the market as budget systems.

[nissling]

Personally, I won't waste a penny more on any more Playstation-console since Ps3 really was a big let down to me. Ps3 really sucks and I can't belive that I even bought it. I have no use for it, so I will keep up with Mega Drive, Saturn, Dreamcast and Ps1 instead. It's a much better choice to me.

[gamevet]

Not to say that 360/PS3/Wii won't be sold for years after the new systems come out. More likely though, PS3 will get phased out like Xbox1 and Gamecube did, replaced completely with PS4, while 360 & Wii remain on the market as budget systems.

The PS3's sales (at one point) overtook 360 in Europe and they've been pretty close ever since. The numbers in Japan aren't even a question.

Sony already has a reduced scale chipset ready for a lower cost PS3, so the prices are going to come down dramatically.

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/p...ed-70-percent/

When it comes to manufacturing consoles, companies work economies of scale, which gradually reduce the price of the hundreds of components that go into the consoles, thus reducing the cost to make the console itself. Sony Corp. CEO and Executive Vice President Nobuyuki Oneda recently spoke on the issue during a recent conference call overheard by TVG [thanks VG247].

“The cost reduction since we introduced the PS3 is very substantial and this is on schedule,” said Oneda about the PS3's manufacturing costs. “We don't disclose how much of the PS3, specifically the cost deduction was achieved during the past two years. But that is on schedule.”

When pressed about the amount that the costs have been reduced, he responded, “About 70 percent, roughly speaking.”

Reports earlier this year suggested that the price to manufacture the PS3 was down as much as 50 percent since launch. If manufacturing costs are really down as much as 70 percent, we'd say the console is ripe for a price cut.

I'd think that MS will jump the gun first, since they have a money pit with the 360 hardware, and the problems aren't going away anytime soon.

[Why-Disciple]

But what if Nintendo is the loser of this gen? Paradox!

[Chilly Willy]

He's completely wrong about the Intel Larrabee CPU. MS won't go to it because having non-x86-based hardware helps prevent piracy. They learned that lesson on the XBox - don't use off the shelf CPUs! IBM/Sony/Toshiba have too much tied up in the Cell to dump it. Instead, the PS4 will CLEARLY just have a bump in the Cell - instead of a single dual-threaded PPE and seven SPEs, it'll probably be true quad-core PPE and maybe 15 SPEs, all maybe running slightly faster. That also helps with BC which Sony likes to include when they can.

[GriskaGyoran]

I see the Larrabee as an extremelly powerful (theoretically) architecture. I don't think that they will be used in the next generation of consoles though. I forsee a classical setup of powerful CPU+powerful GPU since the development costs are wreaking havok on the developers themselves and it would assist in reducing cost of the unit itself. Its hard, actually impossible to project what will happen, but Sony probably will release their console early seeing the advantage it gave the 360 in terms of sales.

[AD2101]

Speculation at this point is a little premature I think. I do agree that the "10 year lifespan" does not mean "No PS4 until 2016," because that's just crazy.

I'm still not really convinced that the PS3 will come out last in sales this generation anyways, they are just a price cut and God of War III away from really catching up on the 360 IMO, and if they can ever implement PS2 emulation into the system, I think the pressure could be back on Microsoft to 1up Sony.

[zetastrike]

why do microsoft's consoles perform so dismally in japan? is it simply because they're foreign?

[gamegenie]

given the state of the global economy, I don't see either company making a move anytime soon.

[gamevet]

why do microsoft's consoles perform so dismally in japan? is it simply because they're foreign?

Software plays a key part in it as well. The first Xbox didn't have a ton of Japanese style RPGs, or many games outside of the FPS or racing genre. They've tried to appeal more to that demographic with the 360 by getting RPGs made by former Square-Enix employees, but those games haven't been all that great.

Consoles haven't exactly lit up the charts in Japan either. Handheld gaming is the real bread and butter there and even the Wii can't compete with that.


http://www.the-magicbox.com/topten.htm

[sketch]

Software plays a key part in it as well. The first Xbox didn't have a ton of Japanese style RPGs, or many games outside of the FPS or racing genre. They've tried to appeal more to that demographic with the 360 by getting RPGs made by former Square-Enix employees, but those games haven't been all that great.

Consoles haven't exactly lit up the charts in Japan either. Handheld gaming is the real bread and butter there and even the Wii can't compete with that.


http://www.the-magicbox.com/topten.htm

The Japanese love gadgets, and space is usually at a premium (small housing), so put the two together, and it makes sense that they're big on handhelds. Interesting that the PSP is outselling the Wii almost 2 to 1, and is not that far behind the DSi.

[jamesdude]

i didnt realize John Carmack the maker of DooM was involved with the playstation.