An executive from an American tech firm believes that mobile devices will soon overtake the performance of powerful gaming consoles by 2017.

Nizar Romdan, ARM ecosystem director, explained during the February 2016 Casual Connect conference in Amsterdam that the chips that his company manufactures are employing advanced technology. By the end of 2017, these chips will create visuals that will rival that of Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One. ARM is a tech design company that develops chips for the mobile devices of brands like Samsung, Nvidia and Texas Instruments.

"Mobile hardware is already powerful. If you take today’s high-end smartphone or tablet, the performance is already better than Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It’s catching up quickly with Xbox One and PlayStation 4,” said Romdan. He continued that the company's objective is for mobile VR (virtual reality) to be the case that can unlock the potential of mobile for hardcore gamers.

The recent prediction hints that mobile users may soon have smartphones and tablets that can run the same game graphics that the latest gaming consoles feature in the next two years. The introduction of excellent graphics in mobile devices can usher more hardcore players into the mobile gaming industry, which is currently valued at $30 billion. It is not yet certain whether mobile devices can deliver the same performance within the same amount of time.

Romdan was also quoted as saying that the current mobile hardware is already more powerful than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in terms of performance. The next step would be to top the current-generation consoles. Romdan also provided a chart that compared the relative power of consoles in terms of their capacity to compute floating point operations per second (FLOPS). The PlayStation 4 can compute about 1.84 tera FLOPS while chips on smartphones are said to be near 2 TFLOPS by the final quarter of 2017.

The executive also mentioned that virtual reality will fix the form factor difference, so that mobile gamers can enjoy the same games that console players run. Mobile VR may be the use case that will provide the same console and PC experience to mobile users in the near future. The processing will not be the same and there will be battery issues, but these will expectedly be sorted out in the next several months too.