What to Expect From the Next Generation of Game Consoles

Here's what we're anticipating in the next Xbox and PlayStation gaming consoles.

 Nintendo already unveiled its next-generation game console, the Wii U, earlier this year. But what about Microsoft and Sony? We asked PCWorld's four biggest gaming geeks to make predictions on what the next Xbox and PlayStation systems will look like.

Hardware Specs: Smarter and Speedier

Jason Cross (laptops editor): The sort of hardware we can expect in next-gen consoles will be very much determined by their release date. As the years roll on, silicon manufacturing processes become finer, which results in more transistors in a given area. That means cheaper, lower-power chips (or, conversely, more performance within the same area, power, and cost).

The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 originally came to market with CPUs and GPUs created in 90-nanometer manufacturing processes. If the next-gen systems ship in 2012, their chips will come from relatively cost-effective 32nm manufacturing; that means about eight times the computing power and cache in the same-size chip. Should the systems arrive late in 2013, there’s a chance that the chip makers will use a 22nm process, delivering 16 times the transistors per square millimeter as in the original Xbox 360 or PS3 chips. Of course, the Xbox 360 and PS3 had issues with cost and reliability at launch, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see both Microsoft and Sony back off a little on the size and power draw of the chips in their next systems.

So what does all this mean? It’s easy to speculate about exact CPU architectures and the like, but that's mostly irrelevant if you’re not a developer. Expect an honest fourfold increase in CPU performance from the new machines. The graphics will probably be eight times as powerful, if not more. Compared with current consoles, which use graphics chips essentially meant for DirectX 9-level graphics, the next consoles will utilize chips that meet the spec for DirectX 11.1. The key benefits, beyond fancier shaders and such, will be that the graphics chips will be flexible enough for a lot of general computation jobs. You can expect many of the next-gen console game engines to compute physics, AI, and even things like audio DSP on the graphics core.

Memory is always a tough issue. You can never have enough, but it’s difficult to sell a game system for $399--and drop the price rapidly--when you load it up with RAM. I can’t imagine either Microsoft or Sony being so stingy that they wouldn’t put 2GB of RAM in the box, but we should really hope for 4GB or more. Over the life span of a system, it would make a major difference in what game developers can create.

The real question will be the mass-storage medium. Whether game makers distribute their titles only as downloads or in physical form in stores, players will still have plenty of stuff to download--other games, themes, add-on packs and downloadable content, avatar clothing items, and more. It would be great for consoles to ship with solid-state drives. If developers could rely on caching their game data to a really fast solid-state drive, the I/O throughput would be so much higher that it would change the way games are made. But with downloadable games, demos, and content growing larger, I’m not sure the cost of SSDs will be low enough. A large standard hard drive will probably have to suffice, but with any luck we’ll see some sort of flash-cache optimized hybrid product.

Game Distribution: Discs or No Discs?

Patrick Miller (how-to editor): The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 introduced the console gaming world to large-scale digital distribution. Although you can complain all you like about having to download patches or being nickel-and-dimed for DLC (I certainly do), Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network have given gamers everywhere a chance to play games that wouldn't cut it on a retail shelf, such as offerings from independent developers, older big-budget games that don't show up in stores anymore, and remakes of classics that probably wouldn't happen if the publishers needed to pay for packaging and production. And since we're all PC gamers here, we're fervently hoping that the next generation of consoles takes a page out of Steam's book and goes for a download-only distribution model.

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