at Xbox Series X gameplay,

and I think the sentiment might be slightly underwhelming.

So there were certainly some games that were standouts.

Of course we have "Assassin's Creed: Game of Thrones",

I mean "Assassin's Creed Valhalla".

But really the one that jumped out to me was "Medium",

which I think they're really good job

of not really leaning heavily into the very, sort of,

neon baked aesthetic of like some future world,

but instead, something which actually looks

really grounded in realism,

especially with the ray tracing put on top.

But this, of course, brings up a very big question.

With so many of these games being cross-gen,

where you buy it an Xbox One, you get it on Series X,

we shouldn't expect the envelope to be pushed that much,

but why exactly there's so many of these games

look very, very similar

to stuff we could have seen last generation?

I remember the first time that I saw 3D graphics

running on the original PlayStation.

It was mind-blowing to me to see

the realistic looking cars in "Gran Turismo"

or the enormously detailed worlds of "Final Fantasy",

in a console that I could actually play at home.

My next console was the Nintendo GameCube,

back when Nintendo really were on top of their game

from a technical perspective,

You look at games like "Smash Bros. Melee"

or even something like "Pokemon Colosseum",

which I played a ton of, and it was a huge step forward.

And then when I got an Xbox 360,

that was almost the biggest leap yet.

Now, at the time, I actually was still using a CRT,

but even so when I first put in that Mirror's Edge DVD

and got to really experience

not only the incredibly clean art style

but that incredible world, I was like,

"Wow, where are we gonna go next?"

But the problem has been that we really haven't gone

that far over the last 15 years.

With the Xbox One and PS4, while graphics looked better,

when you consider there was seven years

between the 360 and the Xbox One,

the actual improvement in graphics wasn't that impressive.

Certainly nowhere near what we had seen

with previous generations of consoles,

and now that we're going into the Xbox Series X and PS5,

there's a real question here

of why don't these games look better?

Why don't we see these massive leaps like we used to

going from PS1 to PS2?

Well, a little bit complicated,

but I don't think that we're seeing those massive gains

anytime soon.

The game has completely shifted, these days.

So take the original PlayStation 1, for example.

This launch with a 33 megahertz processor

and three megabytes of RAM,

which was impressive enough to actually run full 3D games,

for maybe not the first time,

but it was certainly a huge step forward.

But a mere six years later, we got the PlayStation 2,

and it was an order of magnitude more powerful.

We went from 33 megahertz processor to almost 300 megahertz.

We went from three megabytes of memory to over 30 megabytes.

And that was only in six years, right?

It's crazy to think about

just how fast advancements really happened

in those early days of 3D.

Another six years later and we got the fat boy himself,

the PlayStation 3.

This two things up to a whole nother level,

as we went from a single-core 300 megahertz processor

to a seven core SPU,

essentially seven 3.2 gigahertz CPU cores,

and that was backed up by another

almost tenfold improvement in memory.

And when you look at games, like the "Last of Us"

toward the end of the PlayStation 3's lifecycle,

it is clear that this was a quantum leap

over the PlayStation 2.

Not an actual quantum leap.

That's probably a little bit harder.

But it was a huge, huge improvement.

So when 2013 rolls around

and we get our hands on the PlayStation 4,

what we see is a very different Sony

and a very different gaming industry as a whole.

So you see Sony is that company,

sort of had this weird mentality

where they were very focused

on this thing called making a profit,

and that is something that the PlayStation 3

famously did not do for a very long time.

So the issue of the PS3 was that even though

it was wildly expensive out of the gate,

it was like five, 600 bucks.

But, even at that exorbitant price tag,

Sony were still probably losing money

with every single console they sold.

Now, ultimately, toward the end of the generation

they had been able to work out the kinks,

drop a lot of the features that were in the launch PS3,

and they're able to make at least some of their money back.

But the problem was that while the console

was very much ahead of its time,

making money, pretty important.

So when it came time to bring out the PlayStation 4,

it was more conservative in pretty much every single aspect.

So, yes, it did have eight times as much memory,

which is pretty much on par with what we had seen

jumping from previous generations,

but everything else was a little bit more subdued.

So, yes, five times the graphics horsepower sounds great,

except that in previous generations

we were getting like 10 times the graphics performance,

going from generation to generation.

And one of the real downsides with PlayStation 4,

was it is downright an anemic CPU, right?

So, I actually went to a GDC, one year,

or maybe it's PlayStation Experience,

but I went to a Naughty Dog talk

right after they had ported "The Last of Us"

from PS3 to PS4, and they had, in some of their simulations,

seen that the PlayStation 4 CPU was actually less powerful

than what they had been working with on the PlayStation 3.

Now, generally speaking, I think that might be

slightly overblown, but there is absolutely no doubt

that this was not the huge 10 times leap in performance

that we had seeing with previous generations,

and sadly, it seems like that trend

is just going to continue going into the next generation.

Seven years after the Xbox One and PS4,

how does this new generation stack up?

So I'm gonna take the Xbox Series X here, for this example,

because it is clearly the more powerful

of the next generation consoles.

And there's some good and some bad.

So first of all, on the processor side,

we see a four times improvement to performance, nice.

Maybe not quite as big

as we used to see in those early days,

but obviously an improvement is an improvement.

And the graphics are also a nice step forward.

We're getting eight times the teraflop number,

and realistically, probably,

even a little bit more than that compared to the Xbox One.

Now, the memory side isn't quite as impressive,

we're only getting double the memory,

but still, there's a lot of good stuff here.

But the issue is that while the Xbox One and PS4

were built to a spec that was essentially equivalent

to a low to mid-range game PC from 2013, these new consoles

are basically at the bleeding edge of PC hardware,

which means that they've pretty much gone

as far as they can.

Short of any of the crazy stuff that Sony used to do

with the PS3 or something, we've hit sort of peak console

in that then it really is almost hit parody

with the PlayStation.

PlayStation?

PC.

PC and PlayStation, not the same thing.

But, of course, the PS4 and Xbox One

are not the only consoles of this generation,

as they both got mid-cycle refreshes.

The PlayStation 4 Pro, as well as the Xbox One X,

and when you compare those to the new consoles,

it's not quite as impressive of a jump.

So the Xbox One X was famously much, much more powerful

than the original Xbox One, which means that if you get all

the number soup out of your head, the Series X only has

a little bit over double the graphics horsepower

and only about 1/3 more memory.

Now, there's certainly other advantages in the SSD

and the CPU, but we're not on par to see any kind of

10x performance across the board

with these new consoles whatsoever.

They're very good, but they're just simply limits

that we're starting to hit

that consoles really have not hit in 20 years.

For a very, very long time, Moore's law meant

that we really did get doubling of transistors

and therefore performance, every couple years or so.

Now that continued for a very long time.

But these days, it is really tough to get those doublings

and four times and 10 times performance

like we used to, right?

The best way to think about it is like this.

After 20, 25 years of console development in 3D space,

if there's an easy way to get more performance,

someone's definitely done it, right now, right?

All the easy stuffs off the board,

which means that for every couple of percentage

of performance improvement on the memory, on the processor,

on the graphics, all that stuff

takes an enormous amount of work, which just means

that we don't see those 10x performance increases

at all anymore.

Which is fine, bit it just means that our expectations

of what consoles are going from one generation to the next

have to shift with that.

Another element as to why games

that are on the next generation don't look better

is actually a little bit of a simpler one.

At a certain point when games start looking pretty real

it takes a whole lot more power to bring it from

pretty real, to really, really real, right?

There's a very steep curve.

There's a law of diminishing returns.

It's tough to basically make something go

from good to great.

It's easy to go from bad to okay to good,

but that next level is way more difficult.

So let's take an example of what was something

really impressive to me back in the day,

which was "Ryse: Son of Rome", a 2013 Xbox One launch title.

This game looked incredible,

it really did show the performance

of the next-generation consoles.

And while, yes, it might not be quite as nice looking

as a later generation launch,

but it still was a major step forward.

However, what do you do to make this look better?

Sure you can add more detail to the faces

and sort of build bigger worlds,

there are things you can do,

but it's sort of just taking that good

and just making it a little bit better.

It doesn't really sort of bridge the gap

in a way that previous generation consoles were able to do.

If you look at something like "GTAV",

going from last generation to current generation,

what you saw was that, yes, the resolutions went up,

the performance went up, you got more graphical options,

but at their core, these games were very similar.

They were just enhanced versions.

And that really goes for, I would say,

the vast majority of Xbox One and PS4 games

compared to their previous generation counterparts.

You can make bigger worlds with more memory,