Microsoft continues to hype up the power of its next big graphics API DirectX 12. At the Build 2015 conference in San Francisco, Microsoft technical fellow John Shewchuk showcased a Square Enix tech demo called “WITCH – Chapter 0 [cry]” running on DirectX 12. Of course, many will recognize this as Agni’s Philosophy which ran on DirectX 11 not too long ago. Check out the video above.

The demo was running on a quad-SLI Nvidia GeForce Titan X PC set-up. Shewchuk stated that, “The thing that’s really incredible about what you’re seeing is just the density of data that’s involved in this.” Each scene rendered 63 million polygons in real-time, which is “about six to 12 times more than we could do with DX11,” and the demo shows the camera moving in real-time to illustrate that it is not in fact pre-rendered CG.

The textures were 8K by 8K in resolution and “every piece of hair is being rendered as a polygon – this isn’t surface map stuff. I think it’s an incredible example of just how far people are pushing big data.”

DirectX 12 will ship with Windows 10 which is expected to be out this Summer. Stay tuned for more details.

Square-Enix will be holding a separate Final Fantasy conference on Tuesday, June 11th 9 AM – 10 AM to talk about the future of the Final Fantasy franchise. When PlayStation 4 was announced back in February, Shinji Hashimoto promised to reveal a new Final Fantasy game at E3.

Our logical thinking at GamingBolt suggest that the Final Fantasy event is where the major announcements will be happening rather than Sony’s E3 press conference.

Rumors have been floating around that there is a whole new Final Fantasy in the works for the next-generation platforms, and also that Final Fantasy Versus XIII still exists and will make an appearance sometime soon.

What better time than E3 2013 for all these Final Fantasy reveals? Here is a hope that we will be hearing and seeing some new exciting stuff from Square-Enix next week.

Take a guess at the announcements in the comments section below.

Check back on GamingBolt in the coming days and next week for our full E3 coverage.

He informed us, after the replaying of the Agni’s Philosophy tech demo, that the company was working on a new Final Fantasy and that it would be showcased at E3 2013.

No, seriously. That was all he said.

While we would debate Square-Enix’s collective mental health at this point and lose, it does generate some interest. Is Agni’s Philosophy more than just a tech demo? Could Final Fantasy Versus XIII finally be resurfacing? Will it be the next Final Fantasy game in the saga? And will it really be exclusive to PS4?

For all we know, it could just be an elaborate tease to keep us from raging about the tech demo being showcased again after its initial reveal at last year’s E3. Stay tuned for more.

It’s because continuations are a part of life – no matter where you go, evolution is inevitable. As the infamous saying goes, “The only constant is change”. And so it goes with consoles, as we constantly speculate about the latest follow-ups to the current generation. This current generation includes the Xbox 360 and PS3 – Nintendo has been counted out of the race for being too “casual”, and anyway, the Wii U is considered to be Nintendo’s leap into the next generation.

On January 2nd, Microsoft’s Larry “Major Nelson” Byrd posted on his blog about the upcoming E3 2013. More to the point, he posted a countdown timer preceded by the words “And it’s on”, counting down to the next Electronic Entertainment Expo. No talk of what to expect. No news of incoming revelations. Nothing even remotely stating that this was related to the next Xbox.

Here’s your timer, here’s your loose association to whatever value this could have to the next-generation follow-up and boom. Go to work, fanboys, and sell our upcoming conference for us.

But don’t worry. Sony isn’t very far behind when it comes to “talking about the Playstation business”, which it will indeed be doing on February 20th when its first major Playstation event in years in New York. The last event, held in January 2011, culminated in the reveal of the Playstation Vita’s prototype.

Even further back in 2005, it held another a meeting just a few months after initially revealing the concept of the Playstation 3. It doesn’t take a scientist to conclude that both events preceded the announcement of both devices by a good year to year-and-a-half. So you can bet that Sony will live up to the hype (generated by it’s snazzy video) and indeed show us the future of Playstation in just a few weeks.

Let’s talk about this briefly. While it’s wholly possible that Sony will show us something related to the future of Playstation, it may not necessarily be an announcement of the the PS4. Remember – this is a company that went ahead with announcing prototypes and concepts beforehand, and then going on to enunciate about it’s actual console.

Plus, the timing of the event is quite conspicuous – AMD’s Jaguar APU (more on that below) will be releasing in the first quarter of 2013, the Game Developer’s Conference which features developers talking about game mechanics and design philosophies is little more than a month away from the event, and there are still a number of titles to be released, specifically for the PS3, which from a marketing perspective wouldn’t benefit from a PS4 announcement at this time.

After all, would you go for a Samsung Galaxy S3 later if you knew the Galaxy S4 was going to be announced next week?

But expect a fair share of tech demos, announcements regarding the technology that will be powering Sony’s next generation console, revelations about the upcoming motion control systems (again, more on that below) and much more going into the Playstation event.

And we’d be surprised if there wasn’t something there that involved the Vita as well. As it stands, this is a good way for Sony to get the jump on Microsoft in marketing terms without them actually having to reveal the PS4 before Microsoft shows their hand first.

Now, let’s get back to talking about what the future holds by looking at the original rumours of specs and development kits.

The biggest development in the saga was the leaking of development kits for the next Xbox online by a user named DaE, who then attempted to sell them for $10,000. VGLeaks covered the leaking of the kit and its identity, along with the so-called “anonymous-looking black box”, with the code name “Durango” being seen on the placeholder dashboard.

For the uninitiated, it’s been rumoured for a long time that the code name for the next Xbox was Durango. Two applications can be seen on the dashboard – D3D11Game1 and NuiView. The former of course relates to Direct 3D 11, part of the DirectX 11 API used for the Xbox 360 and every single PC game worth a damn, while the latter is “a simple tool for rendering camera views and data from an attached Kinect peripheral.”

Kinect will be the biggest buzz-word going forward with the next Xbox given the obscene success the motion detecting camera has seen with the Xbox 360. It only makes that Microsoft would add more advanced features, which includes the Kinect Glasses for Augmented Reality as seen from recent patents and the like, and even talks of tablet integration.

Of course, there are plenty of listings from engineers hiring for “the next generation of Natural User Interface (NUI) technologies”, “rapid prototyping” and also that a “successful candidate must be able to come up to speed with new technologies.”

Another engineer speaks about “designing, building and delivering the devices and the innovative solution for Xbox and various future NUI applications” along with a mission “to re-invent entertainment, led from the living room, powered by the cloud, across multiple screens and best experienced on our devices”.

Based on the analysis of next generation Xbox specs, Kinect will also be getting its own dedicated input, bypassing the USB input of the current generation, but still upping the standard to USB 3.0. Echo cancellation also appears to be a feature for the Kinect, though how this will play unknown.

Various developers has also spoken about their involvement in upcoming titles for both the next generation Xbox and Kinect but we’ll get to that in a bit.

It’s been rumoured for a long-time AMD’s upcoming eight-core Jaguar APU will be powering both the next Xbox and PS4. AMD will actually look to ship the Jaguar by the first quarter of 2013, and Rory Read, chief executive officer and president of AMD stated that “We have strong design wins for our embedded and semi-custom APUs. Initials products based on these APUs are expected to launch later this year, driving our embedded semi-custom business to more than 20% of our revenue mix by the fourth quarter”.

A lot can be – and has been – gleaned from that statement. This revenue is expected to be attributed to major announcements regarding the technology’s usage in the next generation of gaming consoles.

Considering that graphics technologies from AMD’s Radeon were used in the recent Nintendo Wii U, and that the combined embedded APUs, CPUs, chipsets and GPUs provided 5% of their total revenue last year, and its plainly obvious that AMD has some kind of hand in next-generation console development.

The Jaguar boasts boosts clocked speed by 10% without any increase in power consumption and also features 15% higher efficiency for the new cores compared to last generation’s tech. The 28 nm semiconductor manufacturing process is a huge leap from it’s predecessor Bobcat, which featured a 40 nm process with memory address space increasing from 36 bits to 40 bits and support for SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AES, PCLMUL, AVX, BMI, F16C, and MOVBE instruction sets.

One of the biggest features is the improved power consumption – the design itself is built to provide added a significant boost in performance without overtly heating up the device.

The Xbox 720’s AMD will apparently be clocked at 1.6 GHz would feature 8 GB of RAM of DDR3 RAM, it will also feature about 32 MB of fast work RAM directly connected to the GPU, referred to as ESRAM, and a 12 core Radeon running at 800 MHz.

The PS4 is expected to go with the same configuration, but will feature a 16 core Radeon clocked at 800 MHz and 4 GB of DDR5 RAM, over the much slower DDR3 RAM. The performance deficit is expected to be about 1.23 teraflops for the next Xbox versus 1.84 teraflops on the PS4.

So how does the PS4 differ from the next Xbox? For starters, the CPU won’t take up much space thanks to the reduced semiconductor manufacturing. But this also leaves room for a more significant graphics component to be implemented on the die, the overall result being improved production costs besides the decrease in power consumption.

The basic process of having the GPU handle essential tasks like physics processing to free up the CPU for more important tasks still remains intact, but the Sony will be going for an embedded GPU over a discrete GPU, codenamed “Liverpool”.

Other factors come into play as always. And we’re not just talking about the mysterious “Data Move Engines” that the next Xbox is supposedly touting.

While the PS4 will reportedly allocate 512 MB of it’s precious DDR5 RAM for it’s operating system, the next Xbox is reported to go even further by allocating two cores for customizable apps running in conjunction with your games and 3 GB of RAM for operating system.

This sounds just about in line with Windows 8, which only requires 2 GB of DDR3 RAM to run smoothly. So in terms of pure gaming power, the PS4 will win out. However, the success of the Nintendo Wii and subsequent success of Kinect shows that power isn’t everything, whether in this console war or the next.

To that end, Sony has filed several patents for its own motion detecting camera – one that will allow for finger tracking and depth sensing, which also extends to audio (Microsoft is also working on the same for the next Kinect as well, apparently). Sony’s patent claims that many of the gestures and orientations will reflect within the game itself.

“For example, the user may be able to shoot by different hand gestures, may be able to reload the gun with different gestures, and the different positions or orientations of the user’s hand may cause different graphical renderings of the user or gun on the display screen when the user is interacting with a particular game program”.

We would hazard a guess that these enhancements would come into play with the Playstation Eye. Then again, where does that leave Move? Another article for another day, perhaps.

Among the other next-generation features we haven’t heard about is 3D. Not that both companies were exactly screaming from the roof-tops regarding the implementation of stereoscopic 3D in gaming (just one – Sony).

But with falling costs and a deeper market penetration – further aided by the introduction of 4K resolution TVs – we probably haven’t seen the last of this technology. Expect at least basic stereoscopic 3D support for some games in the next few years.

As for developers, both Sony and Microsoft have a fair amount of support allocated to their sides. Microsoft has Rare, dedicated to developing Kinect games, and 343 Industries which is reportedly working on the next Halo while Sony has its own internal studios like Naughty Dog (despite being terrified of it) and Quantum Dream working on next generation efforts.

In fact, Quantum Dream inadvertently revealed that their next game – Singularity – would be heading to the PS4 via a website registration made last month.

Other efforts from third party developers are harder to predict, but it would be pertinent to mention a particular tech demo that sparked a lot of discussion over next-gen specs: Agni’s Philosophy, from Square Enix. When they revealed the initial specs for developing it, which included a whopping 32 GB of RAM, it was purported that the next generation of consoles would in fact feature this kind configuration.

If the overall makeup for the systems, aiming for lower power consumption and reduced production costs, didn’t make it clear enough, Agni’s Philosophy was a tech demo designed over a period of one year with Intel Core i7 and GeForce GTX technology powering it.

The PS4 and next Xbox will be looking at more power friendly solutions – think in line with today’s notebooks and ultrabooks that can run the latest games on settings that stop just short of full. Given the improvements being made to the architecture, AMD’s technology seems best suited to that task while offering no increase in power consumption.

Think of it as the debate between pre-rendered graphics and real-time graphics. The former may look prettier but it takes many more months to build than the latter. Plus real-time graphics are what will contribute to the overall gameplay.

Having graphics that render more smoothly on the fly are what the next-generation consoles will focus on – as always – and though we may see a lot games emphasize aesthetics over technology, as we did in the previous generation and the one before that, suffice to say that many developers will be getting their heads together sooner and focusing on the practical side of graphics rather than the most visually pleasing.

As it stands, there is a long, long road ahead for the next generation of consoles. Valve is yet to reveal it’s official Steam Box console but are intensifying efforts in the living room PC market, offering an accessibility to dwarf the efforts of companies like Microsoft and Apple.

The OUYA console, running on Android, is a dark horse. It seems like a dream come true for independent developers and could become a major contender given the ever decreasing number of AAA studios and the success of indie games and smartphone titles like Angry Birds, Temple Run and the like.

There is a big, bright future involved, but you can bet that none a single one of these companies will give up without a fight. And let’s not forget Nintendo – they’re still yet to fully show their hand in regards to the next generation, despite several high profile announcements at the recent Nintendo Direct.

For better or worse, regardless of Sony’s announcements on February 20th, the road to E3 2013 and the next generation of gaming begins now.

The Supernova of Kickstarter/Public Funding
The year was famous for many things, but if there’s one thing developers will fondly look back on and remember about 2012, it’s Kickstarter. Until the digital public funding medium was used for games, it was well known just what kind of horrors a developer had to go through just to get its game published. In fact, some developers have relegated themselves to designing the same game, year in and year out, under the whims of greedy publishers (hi, Activision!).

But Kickstarter allowed developers to take away control from the publisher and put into the hands of those who mattered most: the gamers. If anything, it allowed gamers to finally have a say on what games they wanted to see come to the market. No excuses, no regrets, and every dollar made a difference. Double Fine Productions was the first to break out, earning 3,336,371 with their first Kickstarter. Then Obsidian’s Project Eternity gained some ground, and went on to succeed with 3,986,929 in backing. Let’s not forget the return of The Longest Journey, with Dreamfall Chapters also in development. Even the hallowed veteran Chris Roberts came out of retirement to announce Star Citizen and seek funding through his own website and through Kickstarter (which has unsurprisingly been a wild success).

Since then, we’ve had a myriad of different developers taking to the medium, using it to finance their games, but Kickstarter didn’t just ignite a dormant market for funding – rather, it showed that crowd funding via the Internet could actually work. Heck, even Peter Molyneux is down on his knees, screaming “hallelujah!” and “I’m indie! Fund me!” in the name of crowd funding support.

It’s also helped foster some innovations like the first console to be powered by Android, the Ouya. The next year will be amazing not only because of new projects in the pipeline like Black Isle Studios’ Project V13, but also because many of the Kickstarter projects will see release. It’s an exciting year, to be sure, and we can’t wait to see what kind of reception these games generate.

Knightfall: The End of Silicon Knights
It didn’t grab gamers by the wrist, urging them to listen to tales of madness and depravity. But admittedly, the story of Silicon Knights and their slow but steady decline into obscurity was an explosive one.

For the first time, via a former employee ousted from the studio, we got to learn of the cancelled projects the developer never got around to – including Eternal Darkness 2 – and the dealings of Denis Dyack as he personally drove his studio to the ground.

In between, there were annoyances with Activision, who wanted to see some kind of return on X-Men: Destiny, news about the development of a survival horror game known as The Box (which was somehow meant to be a Silent Hill title, and yet was taken to Sega for consideration), the revelation that Silicon Knights had continued using Unreal Engine 3 even after their monumental court case with Epic Games, a look inside the mind of Dyack, who wanted those who left the studio to have their names stricken off the credits list and awarded only “Special Thanks” (until Activision stepped in and called bullshit) and most importantly, how a single ego can systematically infect and annihilate even the most promising of developers.

BaZynga: Something Clever to Say How Farmville Dev is Dying
There was a time when I came across this article and was utterly disgusted. Simply put, when your CEO says stuff like, “I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I dont know, I downloaded it once and couldn’t get rid of it. *laughs*”, you know there’s a problem.

At that point, it didn’t bother me to see what happened to this company who was making money off of people with their shabbily designed “Ville” clones. So even when they went their own way from Facebook – which was hilariously some time before Facebook went into public trading – it only struck me as inconsequential.

Then there were the falling profits, resignations and absurd threats of legality. Sooner rather than later, Zynga had lost its way, with the once vaunted social games no longer offering the same modicum of returns. The developer tried and is still in the process of branching out into mobile development, along with developing board games with Hasbro for its titles, but it’s still in a free fall.

Such is the state of Zynga CEO Mark Pincus that even industry veteran Bill Campbell, currently director at Apple who’s helped many visionaries like Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt in their times of need, reported that he was in tears regarding the state of his company. Will 2013 be the year that Zynga finally folds?

The Next Wave of Consoles
The Wii U might have gotten a head start but quite frankly, rumours of Sony and Microsoft’s next consoles have been doing the rounds for a good couple of years now. You can read more about it here, but long story short, Microsoft’s newest iteration of the Xbox has been called everything from Xbox Next to Xbox 720 and more. Oddly enough, the Playstation 4 has remained pretty much that.

Both consoles are rumoured to be more geared towards the living room experience, with Kinect branching out into Glasses tech to allow for enhanced augmented reality functions. Sony for its part is looking into finger sensing, depth perceived technology, most likely for it’s Playstation Eye to give it Kinect-like functionality. The newest consoles, following leaked specs from hardware running Square Enix’s next gen title Agni’s Philosophy, might contain as much as 32 GB of RAM.

We can’t really say where it will go or which one will be a success, but the console war is about to heat up again. It may be a different generation with different expectations but come E3 2013, if both consoles are really going to be announced, the gaming industry will show once again that war never changes.

Japanese websites GameWatch and 4Gamer reported that Agni’s Philosophy was running on a single GTX 680 Intel Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K clocked at 3.5 GHz with 32 GB of RAM. Amazingly enough, as GameWatch reports, the demos didn’t stress the specs one bit despite running using 1.8 GB of texture data and a combination of MSAA and FXAA. The game also runs at a silky smooth 60 frame per second.

For a standard comparison, most high-end PCs commercially available today use Core i7 CPUs with GeForce GT 650M graphic cards with up to 8 GB of DDR3 RAM. Even if we go a little crazy and create an assembled system, it would still cost a bomb to include both the Core i7 and GTX 680, forget 32 GB of RAM. If the next generation of consoles could easily shoulder these kind of graphics (and more), what does that say about their price and power?

Square Enix spent one year developing the stunning Agni’s Philosophy demo that showcased their next-gen engine Luminous. We reported recently that the demo allowed developers to tweak the settings in real time without making any radical changes, and they also released a video of that which you can see below.

According to a Game Watch report, the demo was in development for one year and it took them six weeks for planning itself. The demo was 3 minutes long and when you consider the time it took for them to create it, it really seems that next-gen development won’t be that easy.

In comparison Samaritan demo took Epic Games 30 people and 4 months to accomplish. One can say both demos were equally impressive. The Samaritan demo ran on four GTX 680s and to create that demo it took them a lot of time and resources.

Square Enix is planning great things with Luminious and their major goal is to reduce development times and increase efficiency.

Thanks, Kotaku.