In that sense one thing I am trying to say is that I feel our current console generation is as successful as it is because at the time the consoles were released they were such a non-incremental improvement on both the previous generation of consoles and alot of the PC's available for gaming on the market. By non incremental I mean sweeping, not minute btw (just wanted to clarify).
All that being said, you have an excellent point in your last paragraph. I don't know that per-se there are that many non-incremental, non-polish items that PC's can do that the xbox and ps3 can't. The main things that I can come up with is the xbox doesn't render in 1080p, it renders in 720 or something, the Ps3 similarly has interesting resolution items. I think the dx11 stuff is really pretty and it'd be awesome to have a console that did that well but I also think that might be more polish than not. It's not just incremental over the level of detail consoles can do now, but it is basically polish.
Also I will say a legit smooth framerate on many of the bigger late-generation games are hard to come by. Rockstar's last 3 published games come to mind. Duke Nukem comes to mind. The pop-in on borderlands and Rage comes to mind. And as another point, many of the PC ports of console games (even the good ones) are RAM limited. That is, they are written to only alot themselves so much GB of ram no matter how much you have. I kinda feel like there's more work to be done in optimizing PC gaming and as far as 'next generation' goes.
Now, in conclusion I can't find a way around
@Narwhalist said:
I’m not convinced that specs are going to matter as much in the next generation. I suspect we’re hitting a kind of “peak graphics” where the amount of effort required to improve graphics (relative to how noticeable the improvement is) is becoming too expensive.
I mean, I don't agree we're that close to "peak graphics" as maybe you do, but we are getting into the realm where changes are more or less optimization and framerate smoothness oriented than not. However, if based on the ign article, the xbox graphics hardware is what they said it is, that's nowhere close to the "peak graphics" curve that we're on today. That's pretty far imo. But I see your point. Maybe the next generation of consoles isn't amazing graphics that blows your mind. Maybe it's a budget oriented mindset where everything is generally good, but nothing is amazing, and it's all cheap. I just feel that if that's the case (and we're really all just getting a bunch of fancy PS2's then) then this next generation won't be the hit that the 360/ps3 generation will.
They don't all have to be winners, but it'd be a shame to take what I feel is such a step down just because non-incremental performance is hard to come by. Also, is it that hard to come by? When the xbox 360 came out it would have cost you some $$ to make an equivalent PC. $800 bucks might make a better PC than what this next xbox is sounding like.
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