Better quality PC ports? Yes please!!

[thilanliyan]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/06/05/amd-aiming-to-smooth-ports-between-pc-and-console/

 

[KaOTiK]

This was a given considering how the next gen consoles are straight up computers locked down now.

 

[exdeath]

They will still purposely make PC ports worse somehow to push people to consoles where they have total control and greater profits.

 

[darkswordsman17]

This isn't surprising at all considering the consoles are running PC hardware and unifying memory addressing is one of AMD's goals for PCs.

I'd love to see an APU based on the consoles. Maybe swap in whatever their newest desktop CPU is, up the GPU, put say 2GB of GDDR5 memory on the motherboard, and then offer an expansion slot for a discrete graphics card. They should be able to make it so they could sell that (with 8+ GB of DDR3), with a Windows license even for $500. That'd be pretty popular I would think, plus it would offer some room for expansion and would be faster than the consoles. Hell if AMD gets their APU and discrete crossfire working well, then it could help upsell on graphics cards (where the GPU on the APU would then focus on say physics so you could up the physics slider in games, while the beefier discrete GPU allows you to up the eye candy/resolution). And it would let companies try to upsell on other things (add controllers, gaming keyboards and mice, headsets, Kinect like cameras, Oculus Rift, etc).

To me, that would be what the Steambox should be. A decent system that would offer a bit of expansion (memory, discrete graphics, and storage mainly) for a reasonable price. It would have high enough base specs that for a lot of games you wouldn't need more (while giving developers a decent amount of power to work with), but if you wanted extra eye candy you could get it without spending a ton more.

They will still purposely make PC ports worse somehow to push people to consoles where they have total control and greater profits.

There's really no point to that when they can just pay for exclusivity. I'm sure there'll be some of the "the unified 8GB means we can't do this on PC" garbage, but even Japanese developers seem to be getting onboard with PC ports as well (Capcom ports like everything, Konami is starting to get into it, Square as well). If AMD can smooth it out for them then it becomes easier and they'll be more likely to port it in the first place. I'm sure there will still be some of the Dark Souls type of things where someone will have to come up with a little hack to allow for more control over certain aspects, but quite a few companies have started to take note of PC gamers wanting those options (Borderlands 2 for instance), and if AMD makes it easy for developers to add those then it could improve things.

And as for control, I actually wouldn't be surprised if EA, Ubisoft, and Activision are wanting things to shift to PC so that they can then push their own systems as then they get all the control they want via their own means (Origin, whatever Ubi calls theirs, Battle.net, etc).

 

[destrekor]

I find it comical the author is worried about overall compatibility using an Intel/Nvidia combo in a PC.
If anything, there might be new rendering pipeline features found in AMD GPUs that aren't found in Nvidia GPUs at a specific point in time, but I don't think we'll see too many moments of bad GPU efficiency or lacking a large number of graphical features when console ports are playing on PC's with Nvidia GPUs.
And I don't think AMD has come up with a x86 CPU architecture that, when coded for with even the most optimal and hardware-intensive goals, doesn't transfer to recent Intel CPUs.

If anything, it's rarely been anything but the opposite in that market for the past decade or so.


Where console ports will have the largest opportunity to fall flat on the PC, is in the controls and overall user interaction/design/UX department.
Code and graphics will transfer between the two platforms extremely well, and that much I am stoked for. Even with console-lead titles, the potential for PC to outshine the console is still very much there... as long as they don't muck it up with bad KB/M compatibility, or, almost just as bad, even with good KB/M support the menus are entirely meant to be driven by controller/joysticks, which can be very frustrating for some PC games.

 

[JTsyo]

This was a given considering how the next gen consoles are straight up computers locked down now.

One of the devs for Planetside 2 stated that working on the PS3 client for the game would result in a better multi-core client for the PC too.

 

[JTsyo]

They will still purposely make PC ports worse somehow to push people to consoles where they have total control and greater profits.

Yea but PC gaming doesn't have such a big used game market, that's a huge drain for them.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

One of the devs for Planetside 2 stated that working on the PS3 client for the game would result in a better multi-core client for the PC too.

That smells like smedley fud.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

This was a given considering how the next gen consoles are straight up computers locked down now.

Exactly. Consoles over the last few generations have become more like PCs to the point where AMD and Nvidia were making the graphics chips in them, they sported hard drives, and the Xbox even ran the multimedia API (DirectX) that was born on the PC.

There's a definite trend of console architecture becoming just a very slightly specialized subset of PC architecture.

They will still purposely make PC ports worse somehow to push people to consoles where they have total control and greater profits.

Profits per head on the PC are better, Bobby Kotic even said this in the media before, console developers take royalties for you using their platform, where no such thing occurs on the PC. This is why console games are more expensive, because developers pass a lot of this extra overhead directly to their consumers, higher priced games discourage sales and encourage a used games market which detracts from developer profit.

One of the devs for Planetside 2 stated that working on the PS3 client for the game would result in a better multi-core client for the PC too.

Well the PS3 has an 8 core CPU, PS2 is only trivially "optimised" for PC quad core, the engine would have to be much better optimised to run well on the PS3, currently it runs poorly on PCs and anyone with good frame rates are more or less throwing clock speed at the issue.

No one can say for sure that they'd have done a good job for optimising for PS3, but I'm fairly sure it would have been better than the piss poor job they did for the PC.