Recently, we've looked at how prices for video game software and hardware have increased over the years, and we've found that when you adjust for inflation, console games and hardware are now cheaper than ever. But how has the raw hardware power you get for that money changed over the years? Has Moore's Law of exponential growth in computing power applied to game consoles as well, or have gaming consoles improved at a different pace? Where do the new consoles launching this month fall on the historical power scale?
Consoles don't have simple benchmarking tools like modern computers, so it's a bit hard to generate apples-to-apples comparisons between different console generations. Lining up the best available hardware statistics, today's video game consoles appear to be keeping up with what has been incredible exponential growth in power over the last decades.
In the early days of console gaming, console-makers touted differences in areas that aren't even considered on today's systems. Take colors, for instance. These days, systems have all stabilized in a 32-bit color space that covers the full RGB spectrum displayed by a standard TV, with an extra "alpha" channel for translucency. Even before that, consoles have supported full 24-bit RGB color since 1993.
On the first three major generations of gaming hardware (from 1976 through 1991, for our purposes), adding more color to your output was a major feature. In 15 years, home consoles went from being able to display a total of eight colors (1976's FairChild Channel F) to over 65,000 (1990's Neo Geo), an over 8,000-fold increase that represents a doubling roughly every year. The number of those colors that could be displayed simultaneously increased more slowly, but we still saw exponential, 500-fold growth during the same time period.
Early console gaming also saw quick increases in the total number of pixels systems could put onscreen at once, going from the extremely blocky 128×64 image on the Channel F to full standard-def resolution of 640×480 on the 3DO in just 17 years. From a raw numbers perspective, the 37-fold increase in raw pixel power isn't quite as impressive as the increase in console color space, but in the early days, that increasing resolution arguably had more impact on the overall visual impact of a game.
The 19 years since the 3DO reached full standard resolution have seen a comparatively much weaker resolution jump than console gaming's early days. Today's high-end, 1080p games only push 6.75 times as many pixels as consoles from the mid-'90s. We're likely at a ceiling for effective console resolution at the moment, with Sony and Microsoft's recent consoles matching the 1080p maximum output of most TVs (though, like always, the results can vary by game). Going by the exponential trend line we've seen historically, consoles that can handle 4K resolutions of 3840×2160 should be showing up in just six or seven years.
More than just adding pixels, early consoles were also busy adding more moving sprites at an exponential rate, going from just five simultaneous sprites on the Atari 2600 to 380 on the Neo Geo (after that, 3D polygon pushing became more of a focus than 2D sprite moving). Those individual sprites got bigger as well. The Intellivision's 8×8 pixel characters were downright tiny compared to the 64×64 sprites the SNES was able to produce just 10 years later.
Subjective sound quality is a bit harder to quantify than a console's graphical output, but we also see exponential growth in the number of discrete sounds channels early consoles packed onto their boards. From the single channel beeps and boops of the Channel F, we reached up to 320 distinct channels on the Xbox 360 in 2005. It's gotten to the point where measuring these channels discretely isn't all that meaningful, but back in the day, you could definitely tell when consoles went from measuring simultaneous sound outputs in single digits to double digits.
Memory, MIPS, and polygons
If you're looking for a single, quantifiable measure of console power that's comparable across all 35 years or so of game console history, you can't do much better than the total amount of physical memory available in the system. The growth curve on this measure has been remarkably consistent over the history of the medium, doubling almost precisely every 1.5 years with very few significant outliers on either side. The 8GB of unified RAM in the systems launching this month is almost precisely what a student of console history would have predicted for systems launching in 2013. In seven or eight more years, consoles with 24GB of RAM shouldn't be out of the ordinary if current trends continue.
All that RAM isn't very useful if you can't get it to the CPU quickly, so it's worthwhile to look at how the RAM bus on consoles has shaken out as well. We weren't able to find much good data for this before 1990, but since then the memory buses on consoles have grown right alongside the total amount of RAM, doubling roughly every 1.5 years. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 are in the expected historical range, even though a lot has been made of the PS4's generally faster GDDR5 RAM (see Andrew Cunningham's detailed take for more on the impact of that difference in this generation).
Measuring the power of the highly disparate CPUs that have been used in various consoles over the years is a little more difficult than just counting RAM, owing to sometimes significant differences in CPU architecture. We can get a decent approximation by measuring the number of standardized Dhrystone instructions per second those CPUs can pump out (note: for some of this data, we had to extrapolate a Dhrystone rating by comparing the console CPU to a similar rated chip and adjusting for clock speed). It's not a perfect measure of console power by any means, but it's one of the best approximations we have that can be used consistently across console generations.
We see the same exponential growth rate in this measure of raw processing power throughout the console era, but the rate of increase isn't exactly consistent. As you can see from the graph, the 16-bit generation of the late '80s and early '90s saw generally fewer instructions per second than you'd expect from the doubling trend seen in previous and future generations. Looking to today, though, we can see that the seventh generation of consoles is pushing just as many instructions as you'd expect based on history, with the Wii U a bit below the trend line and the PS4 and Xbox One a bit above it.
Over the last few generations, console makers have also liked to measure console power based on how many basic polygons they can push each second. This is a hard number to get a bead on; it varies depending on who you ask and what specific game you're looking at (applying shading and texture effects can also have an impact). Used generally, counting polygons can give a decent idea of how much stronger 3D systems have grown over the years. For this analysis, we took an average of the highest and lowest reliable polygon counts we could find for each system. Also keep in mind that these numbers have to be divided by the number of frames per second (generally 30) to get the number of polygons in a single scene.
With all those caveats in mind, we can see polygon power has been showing faster discrete growth than some other measures of console power, doubling practically every year since 1993. We haven't been able to find reliable, baseline polygon counts for the newest generation of consoles, but the historical trend suggests that they should be able to push about 10 billion basic triangles every second. By that measure, the systems would be one million times as powerful in terms of 3D graphics as the Atari Jaguar was just 20 years ago.
It's not just that console power has grown by leaps and bounds over the years, but you get significantly more processing power per dollar these days. The specific values jump up and down a bit based on the inflation-adjusted price point for the systems, but the general trend of getting a lot more for the money is unmistakable. Let's put it this way: if you were paying the same dollars-to-instructions-per-second rate for the PlayStation 4 that you paid for the Channel F back in 1976, the new system would cost over $263 million.
In the end, all of these numbers don't matter as much as what developers decide to do with the power they're given by console hardware. But the consistent ability of console makers to double hardware power every one to two years in a number of key measures has helped ensure that each new console generation shows gamers something that just wasn't possible a few years before. It seems safe to assume that these historical trends will continue and make today's latest systems look positively prehistoric in just a few years.