True. Keep up the good work!

fcuk derp baghead

buildihng a PC is easy,… writing code is iobvisuky alot harder but even still when the right tols makes it alot easier.

I think you know whow dead rising 3 is coming to PC those type if X1 gameswil maybe see how easy it is to port. Forxa Horizon 2 car models looks like how they should of bin at forxa 5 relase. so ill buy day 1 if the models are they same lets face it PC is 3-4 tom,es better so original car models should be avaialable

You keep proving my point. Which is, to be clear

“Down to the metal programming, in other words assembly instructions can be implemented further and more extensively on consoles than PC purely because the hardware for consoles are fixed and stay fixed for a longer period of time”

Again I didn’t say it can’t be done for PC just not as much as fixed hardware.

err nope to the metal has always bin a console thing thats why PS3 and 360 games look better and better as the years go on. Consoles have always had a low level api and to the metal coding.

With sound and NIC’s the PS OS and xbox OS handles that stuff via drivers the game doesnt handle any of it so its still the same as a PC in that repsect.

AMD wanted DICE to MULTITHREAD there engine cus AMD CPU’s are rubbish at single threaded performance but are good at multithreaded but not many engines are/were truley multithreaded so it needed be done otherwise they would of gotten even worse performance out of BF4.

Manufacturers dont stick to those minimum specs well they have to or exceed it. they cant go under spec… its the same as intel and AMD they create reference motherboards so the hardware partners have something to build off of. You only get reference cards at the start of a new architecture becuase the board is new to them. the R9 290 had reference boards cus the architectures and bus widths were different so the manufacturer can build off that design. The R9 280’s and below didnt have one neither did the 7xxx cus there all the same card fundamentally as the 6xxxx series. the 780Ti might of had one but AMD’s GPU run very hot with the standard blower and whereas nvidias dont so AMD needs to have custom cooler on em.

But the point is you target a 780, the refernce specs of that is what you shoot for doesnt matter if anything else is overclocked or not cus that performance isnt certain but a refernce speed is. Thats what they target.

I get what you are trying to say. But here’s the problem. When you say audio is handled by middleware, NICs handled by OS API,etc what you are really doing is proving my point. I didn’t say you can’t get closer to the metal on the PC side. I’m merely saying not as close as you can get if you were just developing for consoles.

Think about this, the whole “down to the metal approach came about at the advent of these next gen consoles, mostly influenced by AMD and DICE, why?

Because no one puts that much effort into rewriting machine code so they are better optimised unless there’s plenty of profitable platform commonalities they can depend on.

I agree that things are getting better with reference cards and manufacturers having to stick to those minimum specs, but still my point stands because you get many reference cards over a period of a year and sometimes twice a year.

no it doesnt lol AMD and nvidia release reference boards which are mostly clocked exactly the same, they are on AMD’s at least there might be slight variations in clock speed on nvidia but nothing major and that reference design is the target you aim at. Just cus the boards are made by a dozen different manufacturers dont mean anything. Bus widths are usually scaled down with weaker GPU’s as it doesnt need as much bandwidth cus it cant process it fast enough which is why you then choose medium or high settings etc. Memory config target the standard one, higher memory capacities usually come out later anyway.

Down to the metal has got nothing to do with all that its because DirectX basically uses a common feature set to get the job done and is bloated and non specific. with dx12 and mantle you can code closer to the metal i.e. use the enhancements made to specific architectures to make it faster because no GPU is truely maxed, far from it because of the inefficiencies and non specific nature of DX is holding it back. I think even though dx supports Fermi i thinkdevs wont code it for that theyll code for Kepler (6xxx/7xxx nvidia) and maxwell GPUs seeing as it wont be out till next year may as well ditch the old stuff, and GCN 1/1.1/2 (6xxx/7xxx/R9 290’s and the next GPU’s R9 3xxx series) the difference between nvidia set and AMD set of architecture wont be massive as later version are built upon the previous one so build it for the core one then add the extra support which gets activated when that card is detected.

NIC’s laughable windows handles that. Audio chips you having a laugh? stereo/ 2.1/5.1/7.1 Dolby surround DTS etc are all supported by those chips even realtek onboard to some extent. The main difference with the soundcards is audio clarity and you only need a dedicated sound card if youve got a really good sound system becuase a rubbish sound system wont benefit from the clearer signal a decent soundcard will put through and all thats handled by the sound card driver not the devs as audio stuff like that is pretty standardized.

With AMD’s TrueAudio there 2 plugins for it 1 is Wwise and forget the other one but its a middleware and is designed to be easy to use and should only take 1-2 days to code in the plugin then the plugin handles everything on its own and AMD’s drivers handle the TrueAudio bit. Game devs involvement is really small.

With CPU’s well even though they say the game engine scales to 8 cores like frostbite i dont think it really does much tbh thatll apply to consoles to cus if you can get 8 cores working on consoles you can get it working on a normal CPU although an i7 may only use 4 or 5 cores cus there like 2 times more powerful than a console. Theres only AMD and Intel and both use standardized instruction sets i dont think theres any specific instructions to either CPU these days. I could wrong but thats it,

Thats my take on it i could be wrong in places but coding to the metal will add to development time undeniably but the performance increases you can get may be worth it to push high visuals

Just take one chip for example lets say R290X, you still have a dozen board manufacturers making OC versions, Memory arrangements, memory speeds, and for some chips even different memory capacities and different BUS implementations .

This is what makes it harder for developers to get down to the metal.

Now pair that with all kinds of CPU’s audio chips and NICs you have what we call a bloody mess.

Complete load of misterxnonsense.

Anyone with technical knowledge knew PS4’s game graphics performance would be better for the entire generation as soon as the specs were official. That was well over a year ago. Apparently it’s taking some people a LONG time to come to terms with reality. It’s going to be a very long generation for you.

PS3 was more powerful than 360, but a nightmare to code for. PS4 is both more powerful AND easier to code for. It’s a win/win for PS4.