A few days ago discussion ran wild after Nvidia posted a chart that showed current generation graphics cards beating out GPUs from when the PlayStation 3 released by nearly 1000%. While numbers don’t lie, Crytek’s CEO has a different way to look at it which explains why consoles have managed to stay competitive for more than half a decade.
Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli had a lot to say about console vs PC hardware in his recent interview with NowGamer, sharing a wealth of positive impressions on what was once a competing platform of his company. When asked about his thoughts on Nvidia’s declaration that PC’s are 10 times as powerful as consoles, he stated:
Performance power and visual fidelity are not things that should be compared. Nine times more brute force power might not result in nine times more visual quality. It may, in fact, only result in 50 per cent more visual quality.
He then explained his statement in more detail:
There is a diminishing return with every increase in power. I would expect from a ten times more powerful spec set-up, a perceived improvement of visual experience, somewhere between a factor two, or two and a half. You would not get much more than that.
The jump in visual processing power from console to console over the past two decades has been striking, with new consoles displaying a high level of improvement every few years. Now that we have consoles that can generate realistic imagery across an entire HD television, each step up simply refines what is already pleasing to the eyes, rather than completely upgrading it. Because of these diminishing returns, Sony has been able to delay moving toward the next generation, and it wouldn’t be too surprising to see seven years go by before an heir to the PS3 is released.
