The next wave of consoles is too difficult to predict muse leading developers, with THQ’s Farrell saying it could be ”seven or eight years” before the next lot.
A high portion of the battle depends upon Nvidia and Intel’s battle with GPU technology says id’s John Carmack. He believes its ”too early to tell” if we’ll see ”radical shifts”.
In a collective interview with Forbes, the heads of THQ, Epic and id smoosh their thinking power together only to realise they still don’t know what’s on the horizon for the next generation of hardware.
”We think it could be seven or eight years before new machines start to roll out,” said THQ boss Brian Farrell. ”Those engines have a lot of steam left in them.”
”One of the things I like about this generation is we are still very early and there’s still a lot of room for growth … as we move down those price curves,” he added.
Epic Games has already begun work on their next iteration of the Unreal Engine and predict it will be ready to go sometime during 2012 – 2018, when they expect the new console generation.
”The worst case is, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all pick a different interface,” notes id’s Carmack, referring to advances in GPU technology and architecture. ”If we end up with a diverse set of GPUs, it would make life difficult.”
Click here to read the full article from Forbes, with input from three of the videogame industries biggest wigs.
Source: CVG
