Despite the new advances made to technology, 4K resolution displays and visuals are still taking a while to be adopted. Robert Hallock, who works as part of technical communications for AMD Radeon Graphics, spoke to GamingBolt about the adoption of 4K is improving and what the R&D department is doing for the future of 4K.

“If you think back to the launch of the AMD Radeon R9 290X, our graphics card markedarguably the first time anyone could reasonably expect to play games at 4K on a single GPU. Sure, there were some games that needed two for peak image quality, but one was and is pretty solid for the majority of titles. We werealso the first companyto offer full support for 4K SST displays in our driver.

“4K adoption is very popular amongst the elite enthusiasts, but understandably slower being adopted in lower-end segments. I couldn’t characterize the rates with hard numbers as that’s not my area of expertise, but this is the sense I’m getting from interacting with the AMD community every day.

“Ultimately, the evolution of GPU horsepower is the biggest factor in driving 4K forward. Graphics being such an important part of our business, of course, you can count on great progress on that front as the years wind on.”

Thoughts on the matter? Let us know in the comments.

Avalanche Studios head of research Emil Persson recently spoke about DirectX 11 low-level shader optimization for both the Xbox One and PS4, especially with concerns to the render output unit or ROP, which explains how many pixels can be output per clock. He talks about how the PS4’s GPU can handle a 64 bit path until bandwidth issues arise while explaining why the Xbox One will need to stick to a 32bit path. Both consoles’ GPUs were compared to the ATI Radeon HD7970, which can handle a 128bit path.

“As hardware has gotten increasingly more powerful over the years, some parts of it has lagged behind. The number of ROPs (i.e. how many pixels we can output per clock) remains very low. While this reflects typical use cases where the shader is reasonably long, it may limit the performance of short shaders.

“Unless the output format is wide, we are not even theoretically capable of using the full bandwidth available. For the HD7970 we need a 128bit format to become bandwidth bound. For the PS4 64bit would suffice.”

“On the XB1, if we are rendering to ESRAM, 64bit just about hits the crossover point between ROP and bandwidth-bound. But even if we render to the relatively slow DDR3 memory, we will still be ROP-bound if the render-target is a typical 32bit texture.”

Thoughts on the above? Let us know in the comments.

We recently spoke to various individuals over at AMD – with answers compiled by Robert Hallock, PR Lead for Gaming and Enthusiast Graphics – about the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, including the company’s role in designing the consoles, and on what the future holds for PC gaming as well what the company is doing to innovate in graphics.

Rashid Sayed: Next generation seems to be firmly in AMD’s grasp, since all the three platform holders–Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo–are using AMD tech. What benefits will this bring to the company as a whole in, say, the next 5-6 years?

"Coming into this latest generation, our flagship Graphics Core Next architecture is the common fabric for any game developer looking to publish. "

Robert Hallock: It’s tremendously difficult to predict where things will go in 5-6 years, but we can talk about the near-term with more confidence: the game development industry now uses AMD Radeon graphics for six shipping platforms: Nintendo Wii, Nintendo Wii U, Sony PlayStation 4, Microsoft Xbox 360, Microsoft Xbox One and the PC.

For five of those six platforms, Radeon is the only choice in the development process. And coming into this latest generation, our flagship Graphics Core Next architecture is the common fabric for any game developer looking to publish. It’s all a bit oblivious to believe or assert that this situation won’t have a positive and obvious effect on the overall level of optimization games demonstrate for AMD architectures.

Rashid Sayed: It has recently been revealed that DICE will be optimizing Battlefield 4 for AMD hardware. Which, given that AMD powers the PS4 and Xbox One, seems to make sense. However, as more next generation titles release for the Xbox One and PS4, we could see more games being optimized for AMD hardware. How will this trend affect the company going forward in the PC market, which is still dominated by Nvidia?

Robert Hallock: The vast majority of the AAA PC titles released in 2012 and 2013 were already optimized for AMD Radeon, including Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, Hitman: Absolution, Far Cry 3, Battlefield 4 and more. That was through our ongoing AMD Gaming Evolved program.

By this measure, I think it’s difficult to characterize a market dominated by NVIDIA; the proof is not in the pudding. And when you also take into account that AMD’s GCN Architecture is now the singular architecture of focus for any developer looking to do business in consoles, then it’s perfectly logical to conclude that Radeon is the force to be reckoned with.

Rashid Sayed: Since Sony and Microsoft have [different] philosophies towards the videogames market, how difficult was it creating a custom solution that catered to their needs?

Robert Hallock: I can’t personally speculate on the difficulty of creating such solutions, and I’m sure Sony, Nintendo Microsoft would like to tell their own story. But what I can say is that AMD’s semi-custom business is an excellent example of our engineering prowess, our world-class IP portfolio, and our dedication to our customers.

"I think the gaming community would do itself an injustice by rushing to crown a winner or a loser. I don’t see it as that kind of race, because we all win—users and, yes, AMD alike--when the market provides a big matrix of choices that can appeal to gamers of every stripe."

We were able to collaboratively design and bring up several unique solutions that, as you say, catered to their needs. Nobody else in our space is offering this manner of flexibility, and our full house of design wins is proof that this strategy is working.

Ravi Sinha: Much has been made about the power of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and how one is more powerful than the other. Given that the AMD technology powering them is the same, how far does technology actually influence the success of either console in the initial period? The Wii U, for instance, is technologically inferior to both, but has still had a fairly decent initial period, however understated, in the market.

Robert Hallock: Success is an awfully nebulous recipe, and I would argue that it’s literally impossible to isolate how much “technology” weighs on the final product. Other ingredients are just as important to many people: price, game library, content partnerships, accessories and the like.

However, I think the gaming community would do itself an injustice by rushing to crown a winner or a loser. I don’t see it as that kind of race, because we all win—users and, yes, AMD alike–when the market provides a big matrix of choices that can appeal to gamers of every stripe. We’re thrilled to be the beating heart of these amazing CE devices.

Ravi Sinha: Following up on the previous question, will there ever be a time where the architecture is no longer a factor in the improvement of one console generation? Microsoft, for instance, announced that it would be able to use Cloud Computing to continuously improve one’s gaming experience, effectively adding on to the base experience (Forza Motorsport 5’s Drivatar is one such example). It could become a matter of “why get a new console when your current games are continually updated?”

" Choosing AMD over NVIDIA is an obvious choice for a consumer electronic device. We offer x86 and powerful state-of-the-art GPU solutions in a single chip with our Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). "

Robert Hallock: I think such a development is best answered by the console makers. It’s only natural that they would know best the future of their respective businesses. Whatever that future might be, however, we are in the business of creating solutions to meet the needs of our customers. In the arena of cloud gaming, for example, we have the AMD Radeon Sky Series of GPUs, which are server-grade graphics processors specifically engineered to render, compress and stream games in the cloud.

Rashid Sayed: How deeply was AMD involved in building/suggesting the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One’s architecture? Also, how did Sony and Microsoft go about selecting AMD over Nvidia?

Robert Hallock: Choosing AMD over NVIDIA is an obvious choice for a consumer electronic device. We offer x86 and powerful state-of-the-art GPU solutions in a single chip with our Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). This is what the console makers demanded, and only AMD has the ability to deliver on that demand. With respect to our level of involvement, the design of the APUs in these consoles was collaborative.

Rashid Sayed: Are there any differences in terms of GPU design and raw horsepower on the PS4 and Xbox One?

Robert Hallock: Sony and Microsoft would be in a better position to comment on the relative merits of their hardware.

Rashid Sayed: Nvidia recently said that the profit margins were low in the console business, and they didn’t think it was something they should aggressively pursue. What are your thoughts on this?

Robert Hallock: The position seems a bit like sour grapes to me. The reality, according to industry legends like John Carmack (citation), is that the standardization of console hardware will, in his words, ‘make it cheaper and easier to develop games for multiple platforms.’ And, he continues, that will improve the quality of games as devs spend time polishing them, rather than juggling architectural particulars.

We are very proud to help enable this sort of ecosystem for game developers, and excited that such an ecosystem runs almost unilaterally on our hardware. I can’t imagine why anyone would willingly cede such a favorable situation.

"A similar upward trend [for PC gaming] was predicted by JPR for 2012, and it bore out positively. Obviously none of us have a crystal ball, but analysts seem quite bullish on the market."

Rashid Sayed: The PS4 and Xbox One have exotic architectures, but do you think they will be able to stand the test of time and give stiff competition to the ever evolving PC platform in the future?

Robert Hallock: I think Sony and Microsoft would be better suited to answer how they intend to keep their platforms healthy over the long term.

Ravi Sinha: Tell us a bit about the PC platform. We know you guys are heavily invested in it, so how do you see it shaping up in the next few years after the PS4 and Xbox One are released?

Robert Hallock: Peddie Research just released some excellent data on this topic, illustrating a continuous rise in PC gaming hardware–$20.7 billion by 2016. A similar upward trend was predicted by JPR for 2012, and it bore out positively. Obviously none of us have a crystal ball, but analysts seem quite bullish on the market.

Ravi Sinha: One of the major bastions for Nvidia is in the mobile market, with its upcoming Tegra 4. Intel has also been making waves in the market with its Atom series and the upcoming Haswell. AMD has recently announced its next generation processors for tablets and laptops, but are there any plans for implementing these APUs in smartphones? Also, how far will the mobile APUs go towards combating the likes of not only Nvidia but Qualcomm, which will release the Snapdragon 800 in the near future for supporting 2K resolutions on smartphones?

Robert Hallock: We are tremendously proud of our APUs and the form factors we enable, such as that VIZIO tablet I mentioned. Ditto our sweep of the next-gen consoles. But Lisa Su, our SVP and GM of AMD’s Global Business Units, recently noted in a call with Gulf News that we have no plans to enter the smartphone market.

"I’m continually fascinated by the ways you can creatively reinterpret graphics APIs (like DirectX) to come up with cool effects like TressFX Hair. Who knows what AMD’s game developers are cooking up? "

Ravi Sinha: AMD introduced TressFX with Tomb Raider earlier this year that lent to realistically modeled and shaded hair on characters. Will we be seeing any other games taking advantage of this technology in the future, or maybe an advanced version of the same? Also, what other areas of graphical design is AMD working towards for creating visual realism?

Robert Hallock: Technologies like TressFX Hair enter into our portfolio of in-game effects that we can offer developers when we collaborate with them as part of the AMD Gaming Evolved program. Other effects in that portfolio include High-Definition Ambient Occlusion (HDAO), Forward+ rendering, or sparse voxel octree global illumination (SVOGI). We don’t force game developers to take any or all of these technologies, rather we open the buffet table to enable them with the tools to meet their vision of the game.

It is absolutely conceivable that TressFX Hair will appear in future games, but it’s too soon to comment on when or what those games might be. With respect to what we’re working on going forward, I’m continually fascinated by the ways you can creatively reinterpret graphics APIs (like DirectX) to come up with cool effects like TressFX Hair. Who knows what AMD’s game developers are cooking up? (Yes, AMD has game developers on staff!)

Ravi Sinha: With the release of the Richland APU for PCs, AMD is beginning to move towards the next generation of PC technology. What does this entail for PCs, and what will be the focus areas for AMD in the next few years?

Robert Hallock: I’m not in a position to forecast the future for our business, but here and now we are intensely focused on gaming technologies. Our workstation team has the AMD Radeon Sky Series of GPUs, designed to stream games from the datacenter to a thin or light client. Our CPU business continues to push the envelope with chips like the 5GHz AMD FX 9590.

"Our APU and semi-custom businesses are firing on all cylinders with the “Jaguar” core for consoles, and the Richland, Temash, and Kabini chips for a diverse range of PC form factors."

Our APU and semi-custom businesses are firing on all cylinders with the “Jaguar” core for consoles, and the Richland, Temash, and Kabini chips for a diverse range of PC form factors. And of course our graphics IP is intimately woven throughout most of these products, demonstrating a real harmony amongst our teams and within our technology portfolio.

Ravi Sinha: Bottlenecks for PCs have always been around, with significant hurdles still existing in utilizing the full power of multi-core CPUs and connections between the RAM and CPU in a system. What is currently being done to reduce those bottlenecks and take full advantage of the power that AMD provides?

Robert Hallock: Programming for multi-threaded platforms is an inherently challenging task, as many PC enthusiasts have probably heard. Therefore it seems unwise to offer products that explicitly depend on such optimizations. Coming from that perspective, we offer a portfolio that enables excellent performance regardless of the developer’s approach to threading. If the developer happens to be particularly good at it, then our architectures are scalable to accommodate as well.

Rashid Sayed: Last question. Chris Doran the founder of Geomerics recently said to us that CGI level graphics is still an active area of research in video games and at the moment artists do not have the freedom to put their stuff at will while they move around the world. Now, we have seen some amazing tech demos from AMD or the recent Infiltrator demo from Epic Games, which seems to indicate that the power to integrate such high end graphics is there but we still don’t see retail games taking advantage of that. What is your take on the same?

Robert Hallock: Tech demos are a very strange and often misunderstood beast. While some demos, like our “Leo” demo, were designed to demonstrate technologies we’re making available in games today (Partially Resident Textures and Forward+ rendering), other demos are very aspirational, painting a picture of where the industry could go in a few years’ time.

"The truth is that these aspirational demos are the ideal, pristinely perfect environment: they’re designed for a fixed hardware target, using the best possible implementation of a technology, allocating virtually all GPU resources to rendering that technology."

It is the latter kind of demo that often causes people to wonder why a technology can’t be in a game if it can be played in a demo. The truth is that these aspirational demos are the ideal, pristinely perfect environment: they’re designed for a fixed hardware target, using the best possible implementation of a technology, allocating virtually all GPU resources to rendering that technology.

But spending your GPU resources to rendering just one effect is not how games work. To be blunt, you cannot blow your entire performance budget on one effect. So the industry must advance a few years to a time when the effect and the quality of yesteryear’s demo now consumes a manageable portion of the GPU’s performance, rather than the whole.

TressFX Hair is a powerful example, because it wasn’t until we combined sufficient compute and triangle rendering capabilities in a single chip with the GCN Architecture that real-time hair physics could be a reality. Many companies have done aspirational tech demos for hair, but we alone were able advance the industry by making it a reality.

I don’t envision a time when aspirational demos like this will ever fall out of favor, because it is fascinating to not just imagine, but see the possibilities the future holds.

A big thank you to Roy Taylor, Robert Hallock, Christine Brown and the entire team at AMD for making this interview happen.

“Well, of course they’re going to do that. They’re a little bitter,” he noted with a laugh.

As for AMD though, “Really by looking at that APU that we designed, you can’t pull out individual components off it and hold it up and say, ‘Yeah, this compares to X or Y.’

“It’s that integration of the two, and especially with the amount of shared memory [8GB of GDDR5, 176GB/s raw memory bandwidth] that Sony has chosen to put on that machine, then you’re going to be able to do so much more moving and sharing that data that you can address by both sides.

“It’s more than just a CPU doing all these amazing calculations and a GPU doing calculations. We are now going to be able to move certain tasks between the two.” He also says that multi-threading “to become a huge deal for a lot of the big blockbuster games.”

Thoughts, NVidia?

However, as if to still showcase its alliegance to PC gamers, AMD is now teasing something referred to as “tressfx”. The company is calling it “a new frontier of realism in PC gaming” with the tagline “Render. Rinse. Repeat” and invites gamers to learn more on Tuesday, February 26th. Judging by the tease and ads running, it would seem AMD is going to tackle the problem of realistic hair rendering in video games.

But is it just us or all these pre-announced dates for mysterious reveals starting to get a little annoying?

Regardless it’ll be interesting to see what AMD has to offer PC gamers, especially given the new NVidia GTX Titan and the overarching technology of the PS4 that is supposedly – and lay heavy emphasis on “supposedly” – wowing consumers around the world.

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 Register reports that AMD wants to get over processor-centric branding. The spokesperson speaking to The Register said that internal surveys show that the AMD brand name is bigger than the ATI brand.

AMD WILL stick with the Radeon and FirePro brands until the new Radeon GPUs are released later this year, when they will make the transition to the AMD brand.

“Fusion” Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) are what AMD are working on these days. These new APUs will contain CPUs, GPUs, video processing and other application specific accelerators.

More on this matter as it builds.