I think this is could be a great thread, Acert93, because of this exellent OP
I don't have time right now to really reply with something well thought out.....but...
we do know that Sony-Nvidia have a graphics roadmap, they said so last year. the start of that roadmap is PS3's GPU, the Reality Synthesizer ~ RSX.
I guess the next major waypoint is the Nvidia PSP2 GPU, whatever that will be.
Then it goes out all the way to PS4 in ~6+ years (or 5+ years).
NV2A: 63 million transistors, but maybe somewhat less for the actual graphics processing core.
RSX: over 300 million transistors, but not everything is for PS3 graphics processing.
but I'll just give rough estimate by saying 60M ====> 300M (5x increase in transistors)
since PS4 is probably going to be 6 years away, (Xbox1 NV2A to PS3 RSX is 5 years)
we might expect somewhat more than a 5x increase in transistors from RSX's 300M.
so we're looking at 1.5 to 2 billion transistors for PS4 GPU. that's assuming NO EDRAM.
neither NV2A nor RSX had EDRAM so.....
now, looking at GCN's Flipper to X360's Xenos.
Flipper was done in 2000. Xenos was done in 2004.
Gamecube released in 2001. Xbox 360 released in 2005
Flipper: 51 million transistors. not all of this is for graphics processing (audio DSP)
and about half of it, is embedded 1T-SRAM (~26M transistors ?) leaving between 20M
and 25M for the GPU core.
Xenos' transistors count, I forget now. it's what, 235M transistors for the GPU core, plus a few tens of millions for the
logic in the daughter die, then the transistors for the 10 MB EDRAM. I've seen total T counts for the entire graphics subsystem listed as 315M, 352M, 385M.... regardless, the total is WELL over 300M
lets be "fair" and call it roughly ~350M transistors (counting the EDRAM)
so that's *between* a 6.5 and 7x increase in transistors from Flipper to Xenos.
and a ~5.5x increase increase from Xbox1 NV2A to Xbox360 Xenos.
we can expect roughly, a ~2 billion transistor GPU for the NEXT gen Xbox.
so both the next Xbox and the next Playstation should have GPUs in the ~2 billion transistor range. though we could say minimim 1.5 billion and maximim 2.5 billion. because of the EDRAM wildcard. or other things.
I spent my whole post talking transistor counts. ok lets move away from that now.
what will they acomplish on those next-next gen GPUs? I hope the efficiency of Nvidia GPUs gets better. I hope both GPUs will be able to provide the next leap in graphics, beyond pixel shaders. such as, some "hack" that provides a workable realtime fake of GI.
or will it just be more polygons and better shaders ?