The studio want ”as many teraflops as is economically possible” so they can create ”the best quality experience as possible,” which will drive people to buy the new tech.
The floating-point operations per second are where the action is, and they’re measured in teraflops. To sell new platforms you need ”awesome games” which are defined by ”graphical fidelity”.
”The thing that separates consoles from FarmVille is the fact that consoles define the high-end gaming experience,” said Tim Sweeney of Epic Games. ”When you look for the best graphics available in the whole game industry today, you look at Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and those games are the best out there, bar none.”
”And so the big opportunities for future consoles is to bring that to an entirely new level by delivering a dramatic increase in raw computing power.”
”We measure that in floating-point operations per second, and now we talk about teraflops - trillions of floating-point operations per second. What we want is as many teraflops as is economically possible to deliver to consumers, because that enables us to create the best quality experience as possible, and that will drive people to buy a new machine.”
Getting people to buy new hardware if you already own an Xbox 360 or PS3 is the challenge: ”To do that you need awesome games that provide a level of graphical fidelity that people have just not seen or even imagined previously.”
Check out the full interview between Tim Sweeney and Gamasutra discussing the future.