I'm still constantly amazed by 1080p and it may age me a little to say it, but I can't see graphics getting all that much better in the future. I can understand games getting bigger, I can understand them having more going on, I can see us getting the sheer processing power to have it happening on screen all at once – but will it look better?
Sony seem to think so, or rather Masaaki Tsuruta seems to think so. In an interview with Engineering and Technology magazine, Tsuruta talks about building a new console, the lifespan of the PS3 and what we might be seeing in the PlayStation 5.
"You have to look at the current solutions and the current technologies and see how long you can extend those for the expected life of the product,” Tsuruta admits. “You always want ‘perfect’ technologies, but there are none. So, you look at what is available, and try to get as close as possible to that goal. Even then, some of the things that we want are still five years away [from development].”
That won't stop the company using less tried and tested technology though. To begin with, PlayStation's cell processor was a joke to some developers, companies like Epic and Valve openly attacked Sony's console, but times have rapidly changed.
“It took five years before we saw games that used the full power of Cell, so we are used to looking ahead and having capacity,” Tsuruta says. “We are looking at an architecture where the bulk of processing will still sit on the main board, with CPU and graphics added to by more digital signal processing and some configurable logic.”
How about Cloud gaming and digital distribution? Have Sony learnt from their mistake with the PSP Go?
“A typical PlayStation console game is 50GByte – transferring those kinds of size over most of today’s [public IP] networks won’t work. But more important is the experience. The [public IP] networks cannot yet deliver it.”
However, and whenever, the next PlayStation is announced, it looks like Sony will once again be looking to the long term. Some people might have wanted them to learn from their previous "mistakes" – releasing an expensive console packed to the brim with expensive (and at the time arguably unneeded) tech – but they know that in the long run their foresight will pay off.
