Consoles vs Mobile devices

Soldato
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With the next-gen consoles both using AMD Jaguar APU's, and the ARM Cortex A15 essentially coming relatively close to the performance of the prior generation Bobcat APU...

How long until mobile phones and tablets actually catch up with consoles from a graphical perspective?

Seems like the gap is closing extremely quickly!

In terms of current-generation processors, the A15′s closest peer is probably AMD’s Bobcat, which is essentially an out-of-order take on Intel’s Atom, right down to the fact that it dispatches only two instructions per cycle (compare A15′s three) to the execution core.
 
They cannot possibly increase the power to next gen levels on mobile devices and maintain the portability and battery life to become a genuine alternative. Not with currently available technology anyway. Give it ten years and they might have caught up to todays console standards, but by then the consoles will be ahead again. Mobile devices will always be behind due to their size making it difficult to fit/cool everything while not having a 6minute battery life and keeping the costs down.

Also I don't fancy the idea of playing a touchscreen 3rd person cover shooter etc. They will always be a device to kill a bit of time on, not have a full blown gaming session so purely a casual gamers choice.
 
I think your under-estimating the hardware - current generation top of the range mobile phones can play games like GTA3 and max payne with higher resolution than last generation consoles with better framerates and the same or better level of detail - and get a lot more than 6 minutes of battery life while doing so. (Check out some of the stuff like the epic citadel demo and Mass Effect: Infiltrator). Its going to be a lot less than 10 years before mobile devices can credibly run the latest games.

Controls are going to be the big issue but I don't think we are far off the day that mobile devices + wireless controllers will overtake consoles for general/casual gaming - most of the top of the line phones at the moment can interface with a controller and output to a HD TV with minimum fuss.

I mean I personally wouldn't bother with a console if I could just slot my phone into a cradle that connected it to mains power + TV, pickup a controller and download the latest games from the google play store.
 
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I am thinking that when Tegra 4 is out, it will put up a fight against early 360 games in terms of graphics. That is assuming manufacturers get over this stuid resolution war. Tegra 4 isn't going to be much good on a 2048 x whatever device...

But the controls and overall experience like Xbox Live will not be present in mobile gaming.
 
I think your under-estimating the hardware - current generation top of the range mobile phones can play games like GTA3 and max payne with higher resolution than last generation consoles with better framerates and the same or better level of detail

They can run 12 year old games? Well sign me up. :p
 
Yeah, that was a bit of a silly example to give =P

I'd love to see a current phone run e.g. Farcry 3, Skyrim, Metro: Last Light, or any other graphically intensive game released in the last 6 months at a decent resolution without melting ;)
 
With the next-gen consoles both using AMD Jaguar APU's, and the ARM Cortex A15 essentially coming relatively close to the performance of the prior generation Bobcat APU...

How long until mobile phones and tablets actually catch up with consoles from a graphical perspective?

Seems like the gap is closing extremely quickly!

Erm quite a while considering how much more powerful the GPU is in the next generation consoles.
 
Does it matter how powerful mobiles or consoles are when cloud based gaming takes off (and it will) you could effectivly play next gen games on a iPhone / android or Tablet?
 
Does it matter how powerful mobiles or consoles are when cloud based gaming takes off (and it will) you could effectively play next gen games on a iPhone / android or Tablet?

Again the limiting factor will always be **** controls. Touch screens are basically useless for 95% of games being generous.

Sure you could have a phone with a built in gamepad, but look how that has worked out so far.

IMO they will always be separate markets with separate target audiences. In fact in an ideal world the casual people will move to phones permanently and MS and Sony can go back to targeting 'hardcore' gamers fully.
 
I have zero interest in mobile gaming myself, and there's very little out there that even rivals XBLA or PSN games, let along coming close to the quality of full releases. Most of the games are designed to be played on public transport or during lunch breaks, you're not going to invest hours at a time playing on a phone.

The capabilities of the hardware will start to catch up with the consoles for sure, but then the following generation of consoles will extend the gap once again.
 
Sure you could have a phone with a built in gamepad, but look how that has worked out so far.

I honestly believe it won't be too long before we see the opposite:
A portable gaming device with Phone features... They already have 3G and WiFi. They could well add a sim slot and a mic/hands-free-headset?
 
With the next-gen consoles both using AMD Jaguar APU's, and the ARM Cortex A15 essentially coming relatively close to the performance of the prior generation Bobcat APU...

How long until mobile phones and tablets actually catch up with consoles from a graphical perspective?

Seems like the gap is closing extremely quickly!

3 Years I think, 2 years at a push.

The cores used are effectively 1 generation ahead of what we have on the mobile front at the moment, but the graphics front is further behind. So 2 years at a push, 3 years probably.
 
I honestly believe it won't be too long before we see the opposite:
A portable gaming device with Phone features... They already have 3G and WiFi. They could well add a sim slot and a mic/hands-free-headset?

Possible, but I already feel portable gaming devices is a dying market. They're far more under threat from phones and Vita flopped didn't it?

Adding in phone features will just increase cost and their audience already have iphones/android phones anyway. I'm not sure personally.
 
I played a fair bit of The Witcher 2 on Gaikai - worked shockingly well.

Yeah, it's not so bad for slower paced games like RPGs and RTS, but you try playing a shooter with that amount of latency between moving your mouse and the picture on screen responding. Unless you're within a couple of 100 miles of the server, physics unfortunately gets in the way of it :(

3 Years I think, 2 years at a push.

The cores used are effectively 1 generation ahead of what we have on the mobile front at the moment, but the graphics front is further behind. So 2 years at a push, 3 years probably.

By which time console tech will have moved on as well, so it will be a constant game of catch-up.
 
They can run 12 year old games? Well sign me up. :p

My point is - it was what about 2 years ago the top of the line phones struggled to play tech demos of stuff like quake at 1 fps and now they can handle xbox/ps1 era games better than those consoles can - at 1080p type resolutions and well over 30fps. Its going to be a lot less than 10 years before they can handle the latest games. i.e. as someone mentioned with Tegra 4 and so on we are gonna be talking xbox 360 ball park.

The controls are going to be a much much bigger issue than the hardware which is moving on at quite a pace.
 
^ What's Ouya then :D

someone mentioned with Tegra 4 and so on we are gonna be talking xbox 360 ball park.

Tegra 4 is around the same level as Adreno 320 (SGS4) and PowerVR SGX 554mp4 (iPad 4)

Tegra 5 (Logan) is the one to watch out for! That should have a full on 2 SMX/384 core keplar GPU. > https://developer.nvidia.com/content/kayla-platform

The cores used are effectively 1 generation ahead of what we have on the mobile front at the moment, but the graphics front is further behind. So 2 years at a push, 3 years probably.

Both cortex A15 and Jaguar are the same gen, they're designed around the 28nm node. Jaguar is a little bit faster but uses a bit more leccy, SoC config is the main difference (double core count, vast bandwidth, huge GPU and designed 100W sustained TDP device)

I'd say 20+ years for thin/fanless mobile devices to reach the same consistant graphic complexity as 8th gen consoles. Assuming diminishing returns, dark silicon etc.
 
Heres some heavily tweaked numbers to make the comparison on GPU capabilities - note these numbers are for illustration purposes and adjusted to make them comparable to the xbox360 era console specs rather than what you'd find looking up the hardware.

2005/6 - xbox360/PS3
500 million tris
4000 Mpixels
200+GFlop


--------------------------

2009 - high end mobile phone
4 million tris
133 Mpixels
<1GFlop

2011 - high end mobile phone
40 million tris
1500 Mpixels
10 GFlops

2013-2015 - high end mobile phone
200 million tris
2500 Mpixels
80 GFlop (potentially upto 100 by 2015)

2016 - ballpark specs for high end mobile hardware
2500 million tris
13000 Mpixels
200+ GFlop

--------------------------

2013 - xbox one/PS4
40000 million tris
16000 Mpixels
2000 GFLop


Obviously this kind of glosses over the rest of the hardware specs CPU, buses, shader/compute feature level support and so on but still its going to be a lot less than 10 years before the mobile hardware can cope with todays games.
 
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