One of the most important things about technology is how long it will last. With the impending truth that the next generation with the likes of Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will someday be over shadowed by the future of gaming looming in the background, the question is how long will the technology’s life cycle last.
PlayStation 4’s lead architect Mark Cerny talked about this future and more recently with EDGE Online, where Cerny stated that the true advantages of the PS4′s architecture will actually start appearing around 2016 or so.
“There are definitely some features in the PlayStation 4 that start to get used broadly in the third or fourth year of the console lifecycle. It’s all about how the GPU and CPU can work together to do many tasks other than graphics, which is say that photorealism is a great target but that world simulation is also important.”
“This is underappreciated but getting your audio right in a game and making sure that your character’s ears are really hearing what they should within the game universe takes a tremendous amount of processing power. And there’s a lot of features in the GPU to support asynchronous fine-grain computing,” he added.
“‘Asynchronous’ is just saying it’s not directly related to graphics, ‘fine grain’ is just saying it’s a whole bunch of these running simultaneously on the GPU. So I think we’re going to see the benefits of that architecture around 2016 or so.”
The new statement from Cerny comes at a time when a number of developers have already stated that the PlayStation 4 will be comparable to a high end PC.
Additionally, on the topic of closed console model, and if it still makes sense, Cerny stated that since their specifications don’t change over the years, “consoles are this marvelously stable target that developers can engineer against.”
“Something like a Final Fantasy game takes a certain number of years to make and I believe that it’s because the target is a fixed spec that it becomes possible for them to create such a thing. And then players really respond to where the games are that they want to play.”
Sony’s PlayStation 4 is currently scheduled to release on Nov. 29, 2013 in Europe, Australia and New Zealand and Nov. 15 in North America.
