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With PlayStation 4 Pro on the market and Xbox One X to follow, Microsoft and Sony's R&D focus is inevitably going to shift towards the next wave of machines. Questions surround the kind of generational leap that's possible in the next couple of years, and how much these new machines will cost. But there's one aspect of their technological make-up we can take as read: AMD's Ryzen CPU technology will take centre-stage - and the shift to a radically improved processor architecture could have more pronounced implications on the games we'll play.It all brings us back to the core concept of hardware balance - the specific combination of CPU, GPU and RAM in a console design. The current-gen machines handed in true generational leaps in terms of graphics and memory (the latter is remarkable in offering a 16x increase over the last generation) but there's compelling evidence that CPU power was the casualty. AMD's Jaguar x86 cores - originally designed with mobile applications in mind - were effectively the only choice available for integration into console SoCs of the era. Two Jaguar clusters were paired up with desktop-level graphics, resulting in a profound impact on the way games were shaped. AMD remains the best partner for the new wave of consoles we expect to arrive in 2019/2020 and with this in mind, perhaps Ryzen is the game-changer. Indeed, it integration may well have more of an impact on game design than the amount of GPU teraflops we end up with in the new wave of machines.
In terms of evolving the games we play - and not just the quality of the visuals - we need to see a shift in different areas of console design, a hardware boost that benefits what we'll refer to as simulation. Consider Grand Theft Auto 4 on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and stack up its in-game world to their predecessors in GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas. Visuals clearly operate on another level, but this is married with a true generational leap in terms of simulation. Liberty City came to life as a thriving, bustling metropolis - packed with various NPC types. But it's not just the volume of them that was important. They were equipped with an impressive range of context-sensitive behaviour: they went to work in the morning, drank coffee, went jogging, took out their umbrellas to protect themselves from the elements - and yes, interacted to a limited degree with the player. The quality of the simulation took on a whole new level compared to last-gen counterparts.
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