Crytek: There May Not Be Next Gen

From Tom's Hardware: Crytek co-founder Cevat Yerli yesterday spoke in a keynote address at GDC Europe, discussing the "future of gaming graphics" from a developer's perspective. He provided the company's timeline up until now, covering Crytek's desire to create an FPS that didn't contain corridor after corridor back in 2001, to the present development of Crysis 2 and the CryEngine 3 engine.

Despite the criticisms the company has received over the years, Yerli said that Crytek will still focus on making its engines highly scalable--meaning that games of today will look even better two or three years from now while allowing older PCs to run the game admirably as well. He said this is partly due to the uncertainty of when next-gen consoles will be available. Although Crytek estimates 2012 or 2013, he also said that there's a big debate on whether there will be a next generation at all thanks to the "relatively horsepower-light" Nintendo Wii.

It's no secret that Crytek has a huge focus on consoles: the company blames its loss of revenue on piracy relating to PC versions. However, his keynote speech also recognized that GPUs and CPUs are on a "collision course," with CPUs becoming more parallel and GPUs taking on general-purpose computing. According to Gamesatura, he recommended OpenCL as a good base for addressing the eventual merger.

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