What kind of specs & features will be in the PS4/N6/XB3

I hope they start it almost immediately, because I need something to speculate on tecjh-wise for the next couple of years after these consoles finally launch.

 

Good question. I think the next big thing has to be lighting. Proper lighting and shadowing are the weakest links in a still image in my opinion. (Moving image is another issue). Of course proper lighting is one of the most difficult things to accomplish...

Based on arstechnica.com's XeCPU article, it looks like the Xbox 360 was designed around the concept of using procedural synthesis, which includes taking a Higher Order Surface model (i.e. like a nurb model) and tesselating it in the CPU and then sending the tesselated polygon mesh to the GPU. This saves bandwidth and file size. The PS3 can do the same thing.

Also, Xenos is said to have HOS support. How much/how well it has this feature implimented we do not know.

On the other hand it seems UE3 is designed around lower poly + normal maps, so maybe some HOS would be nice :?

I would be interested in what some of the other 3D designers and programmers think/want. Subsurface Scattering and HDR both seem to really add a lot of life to images. It would be interesting to know what other techniques that are right around the corner will be able to do for us.

 

Nope. There was a rumor of over 800M but I thought that was for the G70 (and the RSX will be faster and on a smaller process).

There is also the issue of the CELL's input and if it could do even more with the help of the SPEs. We just need more info.