News Watch_Dogs specifications suggest many-core focus

Is that so... that would explain A LOT.

Certainly wouldn't put it past anyone.

But... Where did you hear the game was sponsored by AMD? Mr Google hasn't heard of there being a link and the official site has it affiliated with Nvidia with no sign of AMD Radeon.

 

Nvidia paid Ubisoft $5 Million..
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/32693-nvidia-spends-5-million-on-ubisoft-deal

 

It's surely almost certain that optimised code for the next gen consoles will be somewhat transferable to modern AMD powered PCs.

Whether that's enough to make up the performance shortfall to Intel is another matter, but I can say that for the first time in years I am seriously SERIOUSLY thinking about my next system being entirely AMD.

 

Going back to this article again, and taking the interview as gospel -

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-future-proofing-your-pc-for-next-gen

"I'd go for the FX-8350, for two reasons. Firstly, it's the same hardware vendor as PS4 and there are always some compatibility issues that devs will have to work around (particularly in SIMD coding), potentially leading to an inferior implementation on other systems - not very likely a big problem in practice though," he says.

So basically what he (Avalanche Studios' Chief Technical Office, Linus Blomberg) is basically saying is that the code they have should work natively on the AMD architecture and can then be implemented on Intel.

Whether or not that will result in poorer performance on Intel? well again, it's mostly all speculation at the moment. Watch Dogs to me though merely props up that venerable Eurogamer article and somewhat confirms what the guy on there was saying about the new consoles.

Time will tell, however even if it doesn't flip things around the AMD CPUs are more than fast enough now for it not to matter. They still fall behind Intel in IPC by quite a margin but they're finally at the point where it doesn't matter (using say, 45 FPS compared to 49 FPS on Intel).

 

Drat, I'm clearly thinking of something else then.

However... the technical director has tweeted that the "leaked" requirements are false anyway and will be lower than that.

 

So pc's have had multiple core for ages and only recently some games have started using quad cores....just because 8 core consoles area coming soon games can immediately support 8 cores.....I JUST DON'T BELIEVE IT.

 

I will never understand why PC fanboys always dismiss consoles as yesterdays hardware. Direct hardware access is possible on a console and not on a PC. PCs will always have more overhead. Not to mention that because a console's hardware stays static, devs can eek out every last frame by using tricks specific to the hardware. Something impossible on the PC because of all the variables.

Look at the 360. The GPU is basically an ATI X1800. Try running anything current on a PC with an X1800. You cannot compare them direct like that. What devs are able to squeeze out of these 9yr old consoles is quite astounding because they have spent 10yrs with the hardware and know it inside and out.

 

Direct hardware access is possible on pc, there's just too many types of hardware to make it viable.

Up until the next generation of consoles are released, the current gen are yesterdays hardware. Even with direct to metal coding the limits of consoles have been well reached. Consoles then hold back further development and improvements of games because the peak of performance is achieved and with no new hardware games are developed at that plateaued level.

PCs are much more inefficient because of the APIs required to run on the massive range of hardware, but the rate of development of PC hardware is light speed compared to the up revving of consoles. This leads to them becoming more powerful than consoles within a short time of the consoles being released, even with the required overheads of running a pc game.

If AMDs new api works out this could reduce that over head significantly and put PCs ahead of consoles even quicker and by larger amount.

Plus there's more to PCs than just playing games, there's the whole hobby of hardware. The drafting, building, maintaining, upgrading of PC hardware is a whole part of the hobby that is just lost on exclusive console users.

I'd much rather build my own gaming machine than just have it handed to me.