Will the new consoles change PC game programming...?

[djkav]

At present PC gaming favours the Intel cores. That is, the Intel processors best perform on single heavy threads per core. AMD CPUs prefer to smaller threads over many cores.

PC gaming is largely based on few heavy threads, thus suiting Intel CPUs.

Now with AMD 8 core APUs in the new Xbox One and PS4, console games are going to be programmed to work with many smaller threads as favoured by the AMD cores. This is demonstrated by SOE who are busy recoding Planetside 2 by spliting the main heavy single game thread into smaller many threads. SOE said that this new engine will be factored back into the PC version, giving an instant performance boost for AMD steamroller an piledriver CPUs.

So do you think that new console game development might begin to change PC development an unlock the full potential of the AMD CPU design?

 

[Rroff]

Won't say it won't have an effect at all but I don't think it will have the effect some people want it to have - theres still a jump from the console architecture to the PC one (unified memory, etc. being part of it).

Steamroller seems to be coming with massively boosted IPC/thread prioritisation abilities which will offset a lot of the previous problems with AMD CPUs and gaming and Intel's 4 core/8 thread CPUs actually do pretty well in titles opptimised for 8 lower powered cores so I don't see AMD rolling over Intel but I do see the competition between them heating up a bit next round.

In terms of PC programming its a much more complicated story as its pretty hard to fully thread most game engines without some nasty latency trade offs and some game types are more naturally suited to multi core CPUs than others.

 

[Omaeka]

Might make AMD chips worthwhile this generation, wouldn't bank on it though, it's not guaranteed unless AMD release an actual decent line of procs to rival Intel.

 

[jubei]

May improve amd performance but it will still lag behind intel until amd make some better chips. Fact is they have been on the backfoot since thunderbird.

 

[~>Dg<~]

basically no not much. games will be ported as usal consoles catered for mainly . nothing much changes except the tech inside.

 

[Addicted]

The specs of these "new gen" consoles are still so far behind the PC market, I don't think we'll see anything beneficial imo.

 

[spoffle]

basically no not much. games will be ported as usal consoles catered for mainly . nothing much changes except the tech inside.

They won't be ported as usual because games aren't ported "as usual".

Porting doesn't happen.

The specs of these "new gen" consoles are still so far behind the PC market, I don't think we'll see anything beneficial imo.

Why did you put new gen in quotation marks? Is there a reason you have that they aren't a new generation?

The specs of these new consoles are in line with previous consoles relative to PCs at the time.

The only reason it seems like they are so far behind is because you now have an easy point of reference, you can easily and readily compare the hardware between both because you know the chips used.

The similarities end at the chips used though. Consoles do more with the same hardware or less than PCs. Look at the visuals the PS3 and 360 are still managing despite their ancient decrepit hardware that they have.

Comparable PC hardware of that era (similar/same peak performance) couldn't keep up with the consoles at all today.

For reference (and simplified), the PS3 has roughly a 7800GTX, and the Xbox 360 has an X1900 level (performance) GPU.