Cliffy B, creative director of Gears of War 3, had a lot to say regarding the next-gen and what he wants to see from the new consoles. Gears 3 just came out and looks excellent and considering the fact that it’s been almost 6 years since the 360 came out. It is a terrific achievement. It’s mainly due to optimization and how much you know the hardware that results in such terrific looking games.
Next-gen will be here soon and the reason Epic created the Samaritan demo was to show video card makers a vision for the future. Bleszinski says, “We did the Samaritan demo as a way of saying, “Hey, there are plenty of video chip manufacturers that could absolutely push things further,” he said in an interview with VG247. As you know, the PC tech according to Carmack is already 10 years ahead of the current consoles, which is no surprise. Even the Samaritan demo was created with 3 GTX 580 cards in mind, and can a performance of that level be achieved in the next gen consoles? We can only hope.
He added, “We need to make that leap into a next generation that is not only beautiful, but is visually connected in terms of being online all the time and having social aspects.” Social aspects are going to play a huge role next-gen, and it’s going to be more about providing better services and creating alternate revenue streams for the platform holders. If this gen is any indication, that’s exactly what’s going to happen next-gen.
He wants a better connected experience rather than just expecting better graphics, which is a given with the next-gen consoles. Sure, the processors will have more cores and the GPU will perform 10x better than the current ones but according to Bleszinski, all that is secondary. He demands a better balance in the new consoles and it’s a fair point when you think about it.
Bleszinski wants to see Avatar in real-time, but we know that’s not gonna happen. Why? Because the film was created with a mind blowing amount of processing power, you can check out the details below courtesy of Geek.
The visual effects department at Weta comprises of some major processing power consisting of 34 racks, each with four chassis of 32 machines a piece. The combination of those machines comprises a total of 40,000 processors along with 104 terabytes of memory using 10 GB networking adapters. And if you are wondering what type of computers Weta Digital uses, during an upgrade back in the summer of 2008 their system was rebuilt with over 4,000 HP BL2x220c blade computers.
To tackle the task of helping create Avatar, it took the Weta Digital super computers processing up to 1.4 million tasks per day to render the movie, which consisted of processing 8 gigabytes of data per second running 24 hours for over a month. Often each of Avatar’s frames took several hours to render. And when you consider that is just one frame out of 24 for every second of film, you can imagine why the major processing power at Weta Digital was needed.
So, it is totally unrealistic to expect real-time Avatar graphics but we know Cliff was just kidding there, right? We will never know. If it’s anything like Crytek’s demands of 4 GTX 590 in the next-gen consoles, we’re in for some interesting times ahead.