- Oct 27, 2006
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The thread title seems preposterous, but hear me out.
For years now, we've been stuck in a somewhat stale situation where most games struggled to efficiently utilize multicore systems. It goes far enough that even titles that work better with Quads / Hexes / Octos even have a hard time loading more than a couple of cores to any meaningful degree. Couple that with the undeniable fact that much of game and engine development is of course inextricably tied to the PS3/360 console capability, due to the idea of porting games and engines across the platforms is a lucrative thing to do. This seems to be a relatively recent thing when considering the totality of console and PC history, I don't remember ports being very common in the 70s-90s eras for PC. But what we mostly get now is even historical PC gaming heavyweights such as iD and Epic focusing on making engines that are equally applicable to the now-ancient 360/PS3 as well as PC. When it's done poorly, you get trash like the CoD games, watered down, low-resolution, trash textured dribble that takes next to zero advantage of more contemporary PC hardware. When it's done well, such as BF3 (the engine, not necessarily the game, for those that don't care for it), you get something that is both scalable and can continue to take advantage of higher and higher-end PCs along the way. I've seen it play well on an Athlon II X2 w/GTS250, and of course all the way up to as high as you want to go. Still, it is not the usual cross-platform title.
The AMD Jaguar is essentially an 8-core netbook processor. I am thinking that due to the fact that per-core the Jaguar is fairly weak, and the general truth that console devs eventually come to squeeze every last drop of performance possible in the consoles over their lifespan (look at Uncharted 1 vs 3 for example) : we will start to see a lot more heavily threaded titles coming down the pipe. I don't think laziness will cut it for long with the new consoles, and there is no significant single-core IPC to rely on. I don't even think that just going with existing engines that somewhat take advantage of duals and quads will be passable for AAA titles for all that long.
Previously in the industry, you had not much legitimate financial reasoning to even bother making games that depended upon a Quad to run optimally, let alone a hex or beyond. It's understandable given the dominance of common dual-core processors over the past 5 years. I think it's time we start seeing a change in that area as many old Duals die out, and new games will start to push for Quad-core as minimum recommended spec for PC ports. Just developing those engines will allow for better game worlds, AI, and so forth even on uniquely PC-only games.
What say AT?
EDIT : To clarify, I'm not saying that PC gamers should use AMD Jaguars as their gaming GPUs, but proposing rather that our full-fledged FX/i5/i7/etc will begin to be utilized more due to console development opening the door to much more highly threaded engines and game worlds.
For years now, we've been stuck in a somewhat stale situation where most games struggled to efficiently utilize multicore systems. It goes far enough that even titles that work better with Quads / Hexes / Octos even have a hard time loading more than a couple of cores to any meaningful degree. Couple that with the undeniable fact that much of game and engine development is of course inextricably tied to the PS3/360 console capability, due to the idea of porting games and engines across the platforms is a lucrative thing to do. This seems to be a relatively recent thing when considering the totality of console and PC history, I don't remember ports being very common in the 70s-90s eras for PC. But what we mostly get now is even historical PC gaming heavyweights such as iD and Epic focusing on making engines that are equally applicable to the now-ancient 360/PS3 as well as PC. When it's done poorly, you get trash like the CoD games, watered down, low-resolution, trash textured dribble that takes next to zero advantage of more contemporary PC hardware. When it's done well, such as BF3 (the engine, not necessarily the game, for those that don't care for it), you get something that is both scalable and can continue to take advantage of higher and higher-end PCs along the way. I've seen it play well on an Athlon II X2 w/GTS250, and of course all the way up to as high as you want to go. Still, it is not the usual cross-platform title.
The AMD Jaguar is essentially an 8-core netbook processor. I am thinking that due to the fact that per-core the Jaguar is fairly weak, and the general truth that console devs eventually come to squeeze every last drop of performance possible in the consoles over their lifespan (look at Uncharted 1 vs 3 for example) : we will start to see a lot more heavily threaded titles coming down the pipe. I don't think laziness will cut it for long with the new consoles, and there is no significant single-core IPC to rely on. I don't even think that just going with existing engines that somewhat take advantage of duals and quads will be passable for AAA titles for all that long.
Previously in the industry, you had not much legitimate financial reasoning to even bother making games that depended upon a Quad to run optimally, let alone a hex or beyond. It's understandable given the dominance of common dual-core processors over the past 5 years. I think it's time we start seeing a change in that area as many old Duals die out, and new games will start to push for Quad-core as minimum recommended spec for PC ports. Just developing those engines will allow for better game worlds, AI, and so forth even on uniquely PC-only games.
What say AT?
EDIT : To clarify, I'm not saying that PC gamers should use AMD Jaguars as their gaming GPUs, but proposing rather that our full-fledged FX/i5/i7/etc will begin to be utilized more due to console development opening the door to much more highly threaded engines and game worlds.
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