How long until the next generation of game system?

[Niode]

Developers are barely pushing consoles this generation.

I'd say they are pretty maxed out. fallout3 for instance was better on pc as far as graphics and detail vs say xbox360

Is it possible that developers just didn't know what they were doing? or were lazy?

Considering 360 was the lead platform for that particular title and the fact that the 360 is very similar architecture-wise to a PC I doubt it. There's not really anywhere to go on the 360. You can already see where they've had to cut things back and scale things down compared to the PC versions running on modest hardware (we're talking high-mid range PCs built last year and not god-boxes here). Take Far Cry 2 for an example there's a lot of stuff held back as far as the fire effects and amount of things on screen compared to the PC version.

GTAIV is probably the game that has pushed the 360 the most. The amount of stuff that goes on in that game is pretty impressive.

The main thing stopping games achieving high levels of fidelity this generation is the (relatively) small amounts of ram. The 360 has 512mb GDDR3 ram shared system wide. This can be dedicated entirely to CPU or GPU or evenly, whatever the devs need. The PS3 only has 256mb of dedicated ram for GPU and 256mb dedicated to CPU. This is the source of the problems with the PS3s texturing being muddy or simple because it is limited to 256mb. The 360 can overcome this by dedicating more ram to the GPU for texturing. The only problem is 512mb is quite small by todays standards as far as GPU ram is concerned and for obvious reasons the 360 cannot take 100% of this ram for texturing.

The next gen of consoles will most likely come with at least 1GB of GPU ram and some sort of GDDR3 ram for CPU. They will most likely follow the parrallel computing efforts demonstrated by nVidia and ATi and shift most of the CPU's duties to the GPU for AI and physics. I wouldn't be surprised if the next-gen consoles were made entirely of a unified structure with both cpu and gpu on one die with very fast direct access to each other basically making them glorified graphics cards.

[IcKy99]

i paid $400 on a new console.

that shit better stick around for close to 10 years, like my PS2

[holaback]

not gonna happen son. maybe 5 years

[IcKy99]

not gonna happen son. maybe 5 years

aw crap, now im gonna drop $650 on PS4, with slightly better graphics, and a 20lbs console

[vash23n]

i agree with all of you... take some time thinking of something new and developing a good amount of games to be released on the same day. i still mainly play my game cube and n64... there is no need for a new system for quite a while (im still trying to get my hands on some game cube games). the only benefit of a new system coming out is that i am usually the last to get it and all of the previous generation's console's games come down a little in price... sometimes...

damn i still remember how blown away i was when the nes came out... i had a 2600 still and knew i had to get my hands on the nes... when the snes came out, i played it and was blown away again... a little less with the n64 (which is one of my favorites now)... and a little less with the game cube... and the wii... i havent played it in months! seems that while i bought the nes and snes because the SYSTEM was amazing and the n64 because they added a new element to game play, the game cube and wii i only bought because there are a couple of games i really wanted to play and not necessarily because of any major game play improvements.

[GSZX1337]

i paid $400 on a new console.

that shit better stick around for close to 10 years, like my PS2

It might be supported for 10 years, but you probably won't see many big name hits when the PS4 is out. (kinda like how the PSX was when the PS2 came out)