Addressing concerns that the PlayStation is already obsolete (according to NVidia anyway), or at least that it will be in the coming years, chief system architect Mark Cerny stated that in some ways this rapid evolution actually “plays in favour of consoles”.
Cerny stated that, “Many of the teams take about five years to develop a game. As a result, they need a stable specification during that period and that is what a console provides, ie about one hundred million devices that share the same basic specification.
“The console also tends to have higher performance than would be expected by the cost due to a lightweight operating system and the fact that developers enjoy many years to study the specific architecture.
“Regarding the performance issue in the context of Moore’s Law, our strategy has been to create a console with a number of features for the short term and others for the long term. We have a family basic feature set that allows a wide range of games at launch, and we’ve done a great job of matching the GPU that we believe will allow the system to grow over the years,” he said in an interview with Elmundo.
He further explains that by using shaders c0mputing the PlayStation 4 will be still able to render high quality graphics in the next three to four years.
“To give just one example, we have adapted the ‘hardware’ to allow the ‘shaders’ computing are used in traditional graphics interface. This is the kind of technique that we believe will be used within three or four years of the life cycle of the console to increase the graphical quality of the games.”
These are bold claims and it will be interesting to see how this all churnsout. Some developers already think that the PlayStation 4 will be able to out power PCs for a long time. But practically speaking, will this happen? That remains to be seen.
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