Diminishing increase in console power?

Poly Triangles are a farily useless spec. In most cases it's tested with poly's of one pixel in a linear alignment with no shaders, textures, or even a fill. It's basicly saying how many black one pixel triangles can the system draw in the dark in one second.

If a stealth plane crashes in the woods, and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

I think you'd be better looking at the cpu frequencies, or maybe the teraflops per second. Even that gets thrown out of whack by the multicore 360, so i dunno.

 

It's still an increase nonetheless. What also matter is the amount of special effects it can have on screen with a high amount of polys on screen. The PSX actually boasted 300K polygons on screen if I remember correctly, but with texture mapping and other effects on, the poly count dropped to 150,000.

 

Well, there is a lot more to it than raw polygons tho. Being able to apply shaders, lighting and shadow effects, physics, HQ teztures, and others can make a very huge difference, more so than extra poly's. So I think what will happen is that polygon numbers will start to "top off" and rendering effects will start to become more important.

 

Of course, i think we wont see such great polygons boosts as in the first gen-switches in the next to come...since silicium PC tecnology is growing towards its limit (est 2025 if im not wrong?), and since the power under the a$$ is getting more and more sufficient for almost every kind of application.

 

It would be interesting to see a figure for PS3 too if it is known (for raw comparison purposes only)

 

how much polys does the psp on paper ?

 

From what I've read, 33 million flat shaded.

 

The performance figures don't really matter to me, as I've been noticing a diminishing increase in consoles for quite some time. While there was a very obvious (though not instant) gap between 16 and 32-bit technologies, I don't really see much of a difference in the so-called next generation hardware when compared to the first wave of 128-bit systems. Of course, the graphics are becoming ever closer to being truly photo realistic, but I can remember when the Model 3 arcade board was described as being the very same thing. Since then, there have been few games that have really gone that much further, and I can't get too excited when the leap in technology is clearly minimal.

A lot of people have argued that these latest consoles should have been delayed until some worthwhile technical innovation comes along, though analysts claim that we will soon be reaching the limits of what is possible in terms of processing as we know it. I doubt we'll ever see a piece of software that is truly photo realistic, yet this seems to be the impossible goal many developers are still trying to reach. Instead, shouldn't programmers find new ways of pushing the interactive element as opposed to what a player can just see? Considering their efforts in this very field, I'm hopeful that Nintendo's upcoming system will live up to its codename. If not, there's always Sega to provide the occasional burst of genuis... when they're not churning out half-baked disasters featuring their once legendary mascot, that is!

 

I think people are really missing the point when it comes to the advancement of the 360 over the Xbox. I can't really get in to too many details, but one of the biggest boons to the next gen is the additional memory. Half a gig of memory is an awesome boost over the previous 64 meg, or even the 16 meg of the PS2 (Although, i'd rather have 2 gig, but that's another story). The other advancements come in the form of the gpu. I'm not really allowed to talk about it much, but all i can say is Unified Shader Archetecture. What's built into the 360's gpu is going to take a lot of stress off of the various engines so they can focus on other areas like AI, physics, colision detection, and not have to worry about the dynamic lighting as much. On the other hand, maden still sucks.