DICE 2012: Epic Games sees more hardware generations

At his DICE 2012 talk titled "Technology and Gaming in the Next Twenty Years" Epic Games' tech director Tim Sweeny made a convincing argument that we're nowhere near the final generation of video games.

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Time and time again, we've seen people ready to claim that the next generation of gaming hardware will be the last. However, Epic Games' tech director Tim Sweeney doesn't agree. During his DICE 2012 talk, Sweeney discussed the potential of the next generation of video game machines, and explained that it is far from being the plateau for the industry.

Starting scientifically, Sweeney shared medical research that found the human eye to be roughly on par with a 30 megapixel digital camera and unable to perceive frame rate increases beyond 72 frames per second. To attain these maximum figures would require about fifty times the rendering power of current high-end hardware. That equates to a massive increase of 2,000 times the processing power of today. Even if Moore's Law of chip performance holds, several interim generations remain before it can be attained.

Sweeney explained that advances come in fits and starts. As an example, he pointed out the lack of progress from the innovation of the Blackberry, which made email on a portable phone a common thing, to the iPhone, which triggered the smartphone revolution. He says that, oftentimes, the hurdles faced stem from the limits of the imagination. He sees a world of change coming as a new generation raised with these devices all around them envisions things in wholly new ways.

As such, Sweeney says that we've really only barely scratched the surface. He sees exciting uses of connected devices with geolocation, Kinect and its ability to harness the body as an accurate input device, Siri with voice recognition that actually works, and the tremendous potential of cloud computing playing a big part in the future. And he's looking forward to making games that take advantage of the thousand fold increase in computing power that's just around the corner. For all these reasons, Sweeney closed his speech saying that our industry's brightest days are still ahead.

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  • reply
    February 10, 2012 7:00 AM

    Garnett Lee posted a new article, DICE 2012: Epic Games sees more hardware generations.

    At his DICE 2012 talk titled "Technology and Gaming in the Next Twenty Years" Epic Games' tech director Tim Sweeny made a convincing argument that we're nowhere near the final generation of video games.

    • reply
      February 10, 2012 7:19 AM

      Why would the next generation of gaming hardware be the last? Were people actually thinking that?

      Remember when we had hard drives that were a couple mb or less? People were saying we would never fill them. Remember how people thought a couple megs of ram were godlike speeds and that there was no way we would ever tax that much power?

      Same deal here.

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        February 10, 2012 7:32 AM

        It's a matter of diminishing returns, but I agree, we've got a couple generations still.

      • reply
        February 10, 2012 8:08 AM

        I think the majority of predictions were based on streaming/cloud gaming, rather than some sort of technology plateau.

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      February 10, 2012 7:30 AM

      This is just the beginning!

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        February 10, 2012 8:08 AM

        Of the end!

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        February 10, 2012 8:20 AM

        Positive talks like these are more refreshing to hear than "(current thing) will be dead in (bombastically short timeframe)".

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      February 10, 2012 8:11 AM

      Honestly, what I want to see in the next (and future) generations of hardware is a revolution in AI. Graphic fidelity has been the focus of development for so long and it has improved in leaps and bounds year after year. I know that graphics on the 360 and PS3 are really starting to look a bit dated... but really the gap between what the 360 can do and what would look great on a high-end PC is really just a few coats of polish. More polygons, a few more textures passes, more advanced lighting and post-processing.. that kind of thing which really just takes more horsepower and more powerful hardware but not a revolution in what hardware can do.

      I feel that for the most part games today look 'good enough' to the point where the graphics are no longer the bottleneck for fun and realism. I think the real bottleneck keeping game worlds back from realism (or at least game-realism*) are the characters you interact with, the things they do, the things they say, the way the react to you. I'd like to see massive advancement in that area because I think there is more potential there for improving the gaming experience than just another incremental step in how pretty the game looks. Maybe in a few years we will even see AI accelerator cards for PC.. although I highly doubt it.. it's more likely that we will see some of these extra cores actually put to good use.

      I really hope we see this kind of re-focus on resources in the next generation... I want the next revolution in gaming technology to be AI! Make it happen!

      *by 'game-realism' I mean that I don't think making a game hyper-realistic (in terms of graphics, AI or other things) necessarily makes a game more fun. But there is a certain type of quasi-realism which is real enough to trick your brain into thinking the physics, behaviors and graphics 'feel' real.. even if they are exaggerated or stylized in some way. Either way.. even if it isn't hyper-realism, it still takes a lot of horsepower to execute correctly.

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        February 10, 2012 8:13 AM

        AI, animation and physics. Thank you very much.

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        February 10, 2012 8:25 AM

        [deleted]

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          February 10, 2012 9:16 AM

          Totally agreed. While we might reach a point of diminishing returns with graphics, we *still* have some seriously suspect AI, and we can do a lot with more procedural generation of content (something I'm really looking forward to seeing done well, hopefully, with Phantasy Star Online 2). And then there's animation, which is still mostly rigid and requires everything to be pre-programmed, and physics, which don't do a very good job of, say, simulating fluids or actual destruction.

          We have a lot of "problems" that still need to be solved, so there's plenty of reason to be optimistic for the future.

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          February 10, 2012 9:17 AM

          Yup, I agree. These are the types of things which need more work than graphics now. These are where the next steps can be taken which will make a HUGE difference. (Not that they will be easy... I'm sure they wont).

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      February 10, 2012 9:26 AM

      Related:

      Unreal Engine 4 is running on some things "Including systems we can’t name yet.”

      http://loudmouthedgamers.com/blog/2012/02/09/mark-rein-unreal-engine-4-running-on-systems-i-cant-talk-about-by-name/

    • reply
      February 10, 2012 9:27 AM

      translation: please buy more Unreal engine licenses

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