GamesBeat 2013 concluded its second and final day of panels, including The Future of Gaming Technology Fireside Chat. Senior Editor of The Verge, Sean Hollister, was the moderator and he was speaking to two industry experts. The first was Vice President of Epic Games, Mark Rein, and the second was Tony Tamasi, Senior Vice President of Content and Technology at NVIDIA.
Originally, the moderator focused in on the aspects of mobile gaming on smartphones and tablets. Most of the questions raised were not about future technology, as both panelists responded several times with the fact that the technology is already used gaming and that such gaming does have its time and place, much like PC and console gaming. This topic did, however, lead Tamasi into mention NVIDIA’s project with the codename of Logan.
SoC Project Logan (system on a chip) allows users to experience gForce quality graphics on a mobile device. Using the Kepler architecture, Logan is designed to run OpenGL and DirectX 11. This allows mobile users to experience graphics just like they can on a PC. This is also part of the features of the next-gen consoles of Xbox One and Playstation 4. In a demonstration at SIGGRAPH, NVIDIA has shown that it will even run one of Epic Games’ next generation PC games.
Both panelists did agree that mobile gaming has not yet caught up to current console gaming, but that it is a only a matter of time before it does catch up. Mobile technology grows much like the PC technology has. Instead of a period of time passing before the next set of features are made available like consoles do, mobile technology grows each year.
Other than the talk about Logan and what NVIDIA intends to do with the chip, talk eventually veered to virtual reality gaming. The panelists spoke about how there is a good bit of interest in the Oculus Rift, as well as other companies they knew of that were experimenting with augmented reality but could not name as these companies are not public.
The last thing they discussed was cloud gaming, which they predict is still a long time in being seen in fruition. Basically, it has yet to be proven that it could work in its entirety with technology as it currently stands. Latencies need to drop as well as the whole basis of cloud usage needs to be made more economical. They did say it is not a matter of if, however, but of when we will see cloud gaming truly hitting the industry. There are some developers trying to develop for cloud gaming, though who was not mentioned.
This finalized the fireside chat. Unlike other panels, however, there were no questions from the audience.
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