Digital Foundry: Does all the hard work you've done in getting 4A to run on console translate back into more efficient processing on the PC? What sort of PC hardware would be required to match Xbox 360 performance?
Oles Shishkovstov: The PC side definitely became more and more optimised as a side effect. For example we don't need as much system memory as other PC-only games. Anything above 512MB RAM with DX10/DX11 code-path on Windows 7 would be enough. DirectX9 uses system memory backing store for almost all GPU resources, so you should add around 256MB to avoid page-file swapping.
The CPU side is slightly more problematic. Because the system is heavily multi-threaded, we need at least two hardware threads for "smooth" gameplay. The CPU performance doesn't matter that much, except on a few selected scenes during the whole game as long as it is relatively modern architecture (not Intel Atom!) and has more than one core.
As for the GPU, the console brothers have very little influence on the PC version, if any. The shaders are very different. The pipeline is very different as well. I mean they are very different - they just look similar and utilise the same art content.