Future Xbox Graphics to Rival Avatar

[Bluffmaster]

Future Xbox Graphics to Rival Avatar?

Graphics hardware supplier for Xbox 360 claims games will soon look as good as Hollywood's best CGI.

Technology company AMD (supplier of graphics hardware for the Xbox 360) is claiming that the Xbox 360's successor will be capable of producing the kind of visual detail seen in James Cameron's Avatar, as reported on examiner.com via the August issue of Official Xbox Magazine US.

Cramming the kind of technology it took to render every frame of the eyeball-searing Avatar into a console within the next year or so sounds impossible, but AMD is claiming the next Xbox will launch with this within reach.

AMD would not confirm it was actually working on the next Xbox but director of ISV relationships at AMD, Neal Robison, has said that gamers have a lot to be excited about. Beyond visual fidelity Robison claims that the AI and physics capabilities of the next generation will allow for every pedestrian in an open-world title like GTA or Saints Row to be an individual character with a unique personality. This would mean NPCs would react in a whole host of new and different ways to in-game actions.

Of course, this is far from the first time this sort of hyperbole has been tossed out into the public. Gamers have been teased with promises of Toy Story graphics for the PS2 and Toy Story 2 graphics for the original Xbox before.

IGN

So, whats your take on this? I smell bullshit. They won't be able to replicate Avatar like graphics for atleast another 10 years. Just to give you a brief idea of what kind of technology powered Avatar please read this :

Ever wonder what kind of computing power it takes to create fantastic visual effects for movies like James Cameron’s Avatar? The simple answer is, a lot. And when you need superior computing to crunch the numbers for those awesome looking movie effects, major Hollywood movie productions often look to a visual effects company called Weta Digital to get the job done.

Weta Digital is located in Wellington, New Zealand and as you can imagine their 10,000 square foot server farm facility is often hard at work rendering visual images for movies requiring CGI. Their impressive resume includes previous work for films like The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, X-Men: The Last Stand, District 9, and King Kong, just to name a few.

The visual effects department at Weta comprises of some major processing power consisting of 34 racks, each with four chassis of 32 machines a piece. The combination of those machines comprises a total of 40,000 processors along with 104 terabytes of memory using 10 GB networking adapters. And if you are wondering what type of computers Weta Digital uses, during an upgrade back in the summer of 2008 their system was rebuilt with over 4,000 HP BL2x220c blade computers.

To tackle the task of helping create Avatar, it took the Weta Digital super computers processing up to 1.4 million tasks per day to render the movie, which consisted of processing 8 gigabytes of data per second running 24 hours for over a month. Often each of Avatar’s frames took several hours to render. And when you consider that is just one frame out of 24 for every second of film, you can imagine why the major processing power at Weta Digital was needed.

The computing power that created Avatar

 

[Ethan_Hunt]

Follow only one rule; See it to believe it.

Forget rivaling the likes of AVATAR, let it wield out native 1080p games running at 60fps and then we'll talk.

 

[Bluffmaster]

^Coming directly from AMD, its a pretty stupid claim. Wonder why they did it or maybe its just a case of quoting out of context.

 

[i_rock098]

The article itself says AMD would not confirm that they are working on the next xbox.

 

[nish_pinto]

well said^^ speculation can be a b**ch right now. All we have to do is wait and watch.

 

[Fenix]

I would say this is just a thought at the future . But an xbox wont be needing that power as it will not be rendering image from a model .

 

[dinjo]

Follow only one rule; See it to believe it.

Forget rivaling the likes of AVATAR, let it wield out native 1080p games running at 60fps and then we'll talk.

I want this !

 

[ramdante]

What bullshit!

 

[i_rock098]

IMO instead of worrying about the graphics of the next XBOX, MS should first worry about making it stable, we dont want the next xbox to launch with state of the art graphics but getting RROD with every other piece.

 

[Aman27deep]

PC's can already do this

 

[hellgate]

^^^^ IMHO PC game gfx is no where near that of Avatar.

 

[ramdante]

^^ Not even close to animated movies..Its just so not possible to render everything in realtime!

 

[aradhakr84]

Here we go. Guys, get ready for speculations after speculations from various sources stating news that makes us jump up and down for a minute before realizing that it is not true or cannot be done. But isn't rumors fun?

 

[darksmart]

Whatever technology they r claiming in next xbox,we are likely to see in our PCs first..

 

[kvikram]

This is why cloud computing is the future. We Indians can't use services like OnLive with our crappy internet connections