Our industry sources have shared a rather peculiar piece of information. People very close to the gaming industry don’t believe that there will be another console refresh in 5 to 7 years from now. Multiple independent sources are quite sure that there won't be a new PlayStation 5 and a new Xbox in the 2018 to 2020 time frame. They think that the consoles will evolve into something else, as there is more and more power built in the tablets and other similar machines. Then there is Steam OS that aims to bring gaming and exclude Windows, which offers even more verity than what we have today.

In the 2018 to 2020 timeframe we are taking about 3nm or even 1 nm based chips which can bring between 5 and 10 times the performance at 5 to 10 times less power which promises a lot of graphics and compute power. The thing that works in the gaming industry’s advantage is that games such as GTA V can still generate billion dollar plus revenues which will continue to drive gaming as an important cash cow for the whole industry. You need to see a lot of Angry Birds to make a billion dollars and this is why there is a big chance that PC and some sort of evolved console gaming will survive beyond 2020.

2014 seems to be a key turning point as AMD has rebooted the whole PC gaming industry with its Hawaii chips and Nvidia will have its new Maxwell architecture in 2014 that might spice things up, too. The graphics industry needs foundries to be able to move to a new node a bit faster than they do today as there is not much juice you can get from 28nm, GPUs need the 20nm process to get roughly 30 percent more transistors at 30 percent less power on the same die size.

This is what 2014 brings and there is no need to say that a mainstream graphics card that sells for $199 to $249 will kill the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in graphics performance, there is no doubt about that.