The evolution of gaming technology has been a long, incremental process that spans over a period of more than seven decades. Despite the long history of video games in general, it wasn’t until the 1990s that we really started to see a more rapid improvement across all aspects of gaming technology.
However, six decades of gaming evolution pales in comparison to how far video games have come forward in the last decade. Keeping the recent evolution of video games in mind, let’s take a brief look at three of the gaming industry’s biggest highlight points in recent years.
Enter the Eighth Generation (2012 – 2017)
We are now in the ninth generation of video game consoles, but the eighth-generation years remain credited with bringing about the most profound innovations ever seen in console gaming. There are four primary consoles that mark the eight generation’s progress. They are the:
- Nintendo Wii U (2012)
- Sony PlayStation 4 (2013)
- Microsoft Xbox One (2013)
- Nintendo Switch (2017)
All consecutive consoles released within the same series are part of the eight generation as well. For example, the PlayStation 4 Pro and the Xbox One X offered significant technological improvements in comparison to the regular versions, but those improvements were more incremental than being generational.
To understand how profound their impact was on gaming tech and industry, all we need to do is look at their persistent popularity in 2022. Although the ninth-gen consoles are extremely powerful and far more advanced than their last-gen counterparts, the difference is not big enough to render the older consoles obsolete.
Rise of the Smartphones
Did you know that you can play most desktop-grade browser games from a modern smartphone? For example, these are some of the latest casino games real money can help you access, and yet, they run just as smooth on a new smartphones as they do on any laptop!
While modern smartphones have now been around for 15 years at the very least, they started turning into powerful handheld consoles about four years back. Since almost everyone has a smartphone these days, the increasingly powerful new smartphones with their giant screens have allowed gaming to become a universal hobby.
Nintendo Switch: Software Adaptation Defying All Odds
The most astonishing technological marvel and milestone in console gaming is not related to gaming hardware or software. Instead, we have seen software adaptation and scaling for games at a level that was not even thought possible before the Nintendo Switch.
The current gen flagship smartphones sport a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC which is almost four times as powerful in graphical prowess as the Tegra X1+ T214 chips inside the Nintendo Switch (2019 onwards). Yet, there are no smartphone games that can even compete with Nintendo exclusives such as The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild and Super Mario Odyssey.
The Switch also sports several technologically demanding multiplatform titles like Doom, Alien Isolation, the Witcher III: Wild Hunt, Dark Souls Remastered, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus to name just a few. It’s nothing short of a technological marvel that games which brought eighth-gen consoles like the PS4 and the Xbox One to their proverbial knees have now been scaled down enough to run with immaculate perfection on the tiny console from 2017.
