There’s an expectation upon purchasing a console that it will remain current for a decent length of time, ostensibly long enough so that you feel that you got your money’s worth whilst also not too long that the hardware starts to look dated in comparison to everything else that’s available. Violating either of these two constraints usually leads to some form of consumer backlash like it did when the Xbox360 debuted rather shortly after the original Xbox. With the next generation bearing down on us the question of how long this generation of consoles will last, and more importantly stay relevant, is a question that’s at the forefront of many people’s minds.
Certainly from a purely specifications perspective the next generation of high performance consoles aren’t going to be among the fastest systems available for long. Both of them are sporting current gen CPUs and GPUs however it’s quite likely that their hardware will be superseded before they ever hit the retail shelves. AMD is currently gearing up to release their 8000 series GPUs sometime in the second quarter of this year. The CPUs are both based off AMD’s Jaguar micro-architecture and should be current for at least a year or so after their initial release, at least in terms of the AMD line, although with the release of Haswell from Intel scheduled for some time in the middle of this year means that even the CPUs will be somewhat outdated upon release. This is par for the course for any kind of IT hardware however so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that more powerful options will be available even before their initial release.
Indeed consoles have always had a hard time keeping up with PCs in terms of raw computing power although the lack of a consistent, highly optimizable platform is what keeps consoles in the game long after their hardware has become ancient. There does come a time however when the optimizations just aren’t sufficient and the games start to stagnant which is what led to the more noticeable forms of consolization that made their way into PC games. It’s interesting to note this as whilst the current generations of consoles have been wildly popular since their inception the problem of consolization wasn’t really apparent until many years afterwards, ostensibly when PC power started to heavily outstrip the current gen consoles’ abilities.
Crytek head honcho Cevat Yerli has gone on record saying that even the next gen consoles won’t be able to keep up with PCs when it comes to raw power. Now this isn’t a particularly novel observation in itself, any PC gamer would be able to tell you this, but bringing in the notion of price is an intriguing one. As far as we can tell the next generation of consoles will come out at around $600, maybe $800 if Sony/Microsoft don’t want to use them as loss leaders any more. Whilst they’re going to be theoretically outmatched by $2000 gaming beasts from day 1 it gets a lot more interesting if we start making comparisons to a similarly priced PC and the capabilities it will have. In that regard consoles actually offer quite a good value proposition for quite a while to come.
So out of curiosity I specced up a PC that was comparable to the next gen consoles and came out at around $950. At this end of the spectrum prices aren’t affected as much by Moore’s Law since they’re so cheap already and the only part that would likely see major depreciation would be the graphics card which came in at about $300. Still, taking the optimizations that can be made on consoles into account, the next gen consoles do represent pretty good value for the performance they will deliver on release and will continue to do so for at least 2~3 (1~2 iterations of Moore’s Law) years afterwards thanks to their low price point. Past then the current generation of CPUs and GPUs will perform well enough at the same price point in order to beat them in a price per dollar scenario.
In all honesty I hadn’t really thought of making a direct comparison at the same price point before and the results were quite surprising. The comparison is even more apt now thanks to the next generation coming with a x86 architecture underneath which essentially makes them cheap PCs. Sure they may never match up to the latest and greatest but they sure do provide some pretty good value. Whilst I didn’t think they’d have trouble selling these things this kind of comparison will make the decision to buy one of them that much easier, at least to people like me who are all about extracting the maximum value for their dollars spent.
