Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has claimed that next-generation consoles need to be drastically more powerful if they are to succeed.

“The thing that separates consoles from FarmVille is the fact that consoles define the high-end gaming experience,” he told Gamasutra. “When you look for the best graphics available in the whole game industry today, you look at Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and those games are the best out there, bar none.”

“And so the big opportunities for future consoles is to bring that to an entirely new level by delivering a dramatic increase in raw computing power.”

“We measure that in floating-point operations per second, and now we talk about teraflops, trillions of floating-point operations per second. What we want is as many teraflops as is economically possible to deliver to consumers, because that enables us to create the best quality experience as possible, and that will drive people to buy a new machine,” Sweeney added.

He also believes that insane graphics power will be needed in order to convince PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 owners to trade-up: ”To do that you need awesome games that provide a level of graphical fidelity that people have just not seen or even imagined previously.”

Everybody has been saying for at least the last year that the next-generation of consoles needs to be something special if it’s to succeed. We’re all hoping, praying and wishing that Microsoft and Sony will deliver something out of this world. Nobody outside of top developers and Microsoft employees know what to expect from these mystical machines, but if it’s not good enough it could signal a massive drop in console gamers.

Are you looking for better graphics,new ways to play or something else from next-generation consoles?

As reported by: EGM