What will become of the next-gen gaming consoles?

A rival has pitted three companies against each other for the title of King of Consoles. This rival is good for all of us gamers since it pushes these companies to improve and upgrade hardware for a better gaming experience.

There was a time when Nintendo had a high footing on the industry and reigned its title for many years until larger corporations realized the revenue potential this industry was about to generate. In comes Sony with the Playstation poor Sonic didn’t have a chance against this machine. Even as popular as Sonic was and still is to this day there was just no competition with the new genre on games that the Playstation brought to the table. As Sony built its steam Microsoft soon joined in and Halo became the new giant. With the new graphics that were displayed, Sony had to re-vamp its game plan. Sony stuck it to Microsoft with the Playstation 2 and many more games came to light but that’s when it started getting good. Out of this rival we saw the release of the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 which we all use today and the games have become epic. Nintendo still holds it’s ground with the Wii and is a good family console which remains very popular.

Now in all this I haven’t touched on PC due to this being a factor to this rival that really has not had to compete. PC gamers a hard-core niche in itself.

Well, enough about the rival of yesterday and more about the technology of today. For console gamers it has always been behind compared to PC. With the PC you can have cutting edge graphics and fast pace game play, all at the expense of purchasing the latest and newest hardware. This is where console games have longed to mingle and soon this may be closer to reality than we think. Not to downplay the power or graphics of a console game but with the latest Unreal 3 engine this type of graphical experience is groundbreaking. The detail of all the elements you would see in real life can be visually stunning with this new engine. The down side is that you need powerful hardware to get this experience. This is only capable while running dual (or more) graphics cards that are far more powerful than that of a single GPU in a game console. For example in the demo video below of the Unreal 3 engine, 3 Nvidia Geforce GTX 580 graphics cards are used to mesh all the lighting, sub surface scattering and shadows.

The current PS3 and Xbox need to catch up to the growing development that games are evolving to. The current hardware as great as it is does not have the horsepower to match that of the way games can currently be developed. The hardware simply needs to be upgraded. The console giants could loose revenue and popularity if it falls too far behind. In come the rumors of new game consoles. This years E3 will be a spectacle to behold. All three console giants could be announcing new hardware possibilities.

Nintendo has already shown the Wii U at E3 2011 but in my opinion Nintendo is a day late and a dollar short. Kinect has surpassed and will continue to surpass the Wii tech of motion gameplay. So what will come of the latest hardware? My prediction is that Xbox will have a powerhouse of a machine to reckon with. I think that GPU upgrades are on the list as well as the rumored finger and emotion recognition of the Kinect 2. Sony on the other hand will need to step it up! The “Move” had some disappointing sales and was not enough to compete against the Kinect. Sony will have some great things to announce and the fact that it uses blue Ray technology will continue to make it a crowd pleaser.

So in closing while I expressed mostly opinions and rumors the only facts are that the industry as well as technology is changing and growing. Like the Smartphone market, game consoles will see upgrades and revisions that will continue to make them cutting edge.

Update: Looks like a new console from Sony is a NO GO. SOE chairman Kazuo Hirai stated at CES that his company will not be unveiling a new console at E3 this summer.

Since it won’t be at E3 will it be later this year??