Technology has been at the forefront of transforming the gaming industry. Tech innovations have improved the gaming hardware as well as the games themselves, making the gameplay better and more immersive. Game console makers Microsoft and Sony have been hitting the reset button on their consoles after every seven years launching new consoles to their fans. If you understood how much bacteria are on the average console, you would clean and care for your console frequently, in these seven years. Cleaning your console is very important, as this recent study by Betway demonstrates that your console can harbor serious amounts of bacteria!
The launches are usually accompanied by the typical fanfare, including press tours, demo kiosks, and long lines on launch night.
In 2020, gamers could not witness this fanfare because of the health protocols. Microsoft released its Xbox X Series and Series S consoles on November 10. Sony released its PS5 two days later, on November 12. Online orders marked the launches, and the large crowds of passionate fans were missing. The new consoles represented yet another turning point for the gaming industry.
In this elaborate piece, you will find out how Microsoft’s and Sony’s new consoles are changing game technology. Read on to discover more.
They Will Affect Game Development
The new consoles come with new capabilities such as 1 terabyte SSD (Solid-State hard drive) and graphics capabilities that can handle real-time ray tracing. These features will enable game developers to come up with real-time game content that appears photo-realistic.
Moreover, the consoles’ ability to output 8K screen resolutions that almost reach the ceiling in terms of what the human retina can perceive is also a notable development. These capabilities also give room for massive development for the future. The frames that could take a Pixar movie minutes to render can now be computed and rendered in a sixtieth of a second.
In the gaming industry, reaching 60 to 90 FPS (Frames per Second) consistently means that you can enjoy snappier gameplay. Moreover, the animations become more fluid, and Lane adds make it possible for developers to offer a more lifelike virtual reality experience.
The experience will also be without simulator sickness that occurs when there is visual lag resulting from low frame rates. The new consoles have addressed these issues, thereby setting a new standard outside the PC realm.
Hardware-Based Ray Tracing
The ability to incorporate hardware-based ray tracing in the next-gen consoles is also a game-changer. Ray Tracing is a computer graphics process that reproduces the physical behavior of light in the real world more closely. This is different from the standard rasterization technique used in games which usually estimates light’s behavior.
Previously, it was computationally expensive to use ray tracing in games as it requires maintaining 60 frames per second or around 16 milliseconds per frame. However, the advent of hardware-based ray tracing has made it viable to use ray tracing in games, enabling more realism.
This mimics the world more closely and gets gamers more real-world visual artifacts like shadows, reflections, and refractions.
SSD’s Significance
The new consoles also come with SSDs that enable them to load enormous amounts of data within seconds. The speeds are approximately a quarter of a tenth of the time compared to previous generations. This is a notable development because video games are getting larger, and it is normal for big-budget games to take up dozens of gigabytes. In the past, a game would fit on a CD-ROM, but nowadays, a single AAA game can go over 50GB!
The Gaming World Is Moving In Three Directions
The gaming world seems to be moving in three directions simultaneously. One point has the passionate gamers who want the latest and top-of-the-range hardware and play games on their PC.
On the other hand, companies like Microsoft and Google don’t expect their clients to invest a lot of money in hardware. As a result, they are trying to move the technology to cloud servers while focusing on delivering games and interfaces.
This gaming model has its challenges as broadband access is not universal and gamers playing games that require high frame rates are faced with bandwidth problems.
The third point is a convergence which means there is not much consumer choice for hardware. Furthermore, because the hardware is the same for everyone, whether you are buying a PlayStation or Xbox, the cost of development reduces. Also, games are optimized more because the hardware sets are familiar.
The convergence of hardware technology makes the “console war” hard to call. The games are still trendy, and the products released by the two companies are similar to each other.
Streaming Could Be the Tipping Point
The disruptor looming on the horizon is game streaming or Netflix-for -gaming. Industry experts argue that streaming will not work until it works. They suggest that, with tipping points, it is slow, and then boom! Everyone is streaming games.
The real challenge of consoles is to anticipate when the streaming lightning bolt will hit. Microsoft has already set a foundation with Game Pass subscription service that offers gamers access to a game library at a monthly rate.
Leave a Reply