GI: More generally speaking, what are the things you are looking for in next-gen systems, the kinds of things that get you and Epic excited creatively?
TS: Gosh, my list for the next generation; it's really two big things. One is to bring all that's best about other computing devices - the convenience, the access to social media, the connectivity with the internet, Facebook or Twitter - and continue to bring that forward in the console experience. If you look at the console generation previous to this one, these were offline devices. You'd install a game, play it by yourself and you're done. Nowadays you go online, play games, and buy games through XBLA or PSN. I think we've really only seen the tip of the iceberg there. There is a continual challenge for the industry to push forward in order to remain relevant and competitive with the awesome things that are happening on iOS for example.
"If you go into the next generation with a budget of $100 million, you are doing it wrong and are being far too brute force."
Tim Sweeney
Number two is to deliver the maximum amount of computing power that is economically possible. Really, that's the reason consoles exist in the future. They have an enormous amount of graphics processing power that delivers an experience that goes far beyond what you can get on a lighter weight device. Pushing forward, we measure that performance in teraflops, trillions of floating point operations per second. When I started programming, you had about one thousand floating point operations per second. Now we have, on nVidia's fastest hardware, two and a half to three teraflops. To push next-generation up to those levels will really ensure that they will remain relevant for another generation, even as other cool consumer devices like iPads and iPhones become more prevalent.
