| KBG29 said: Minimum 6GB of RAM, every generation before this has had around a 12x increase in memory. So I expect this gen to be at least that, but givin the extra 2 - 3 years this gen will have lasted, 8-10 would seem reasonable. CPU and GPU are near impossible to say. If I had to guess, some sort of 8 to 12 core CPU around 3GHz, with lots of embedded memory. On the GPU side, must be around current year top end GPU if its going to be a year to a year and a half away. I would hate to see any system ship without some sort of high speed storage, either flash or a small SSD. Blu-ray with 4 layer support. I am expecting one company to go all out and have specs very similar to this, another to be in between with some unique features, and another to be even lower in power, and even less unique. Hopefully the cards will be revealed at E3. |
This is a good philosophy but the technological details disagree now. We hit a wall at 4GB RAM for gaming, and that's running Windows in the background. You can max out most PC games with 4GB of RAM, although most people have 6-8GB of RAM just because its cheap.
As far as CPU goes, gaming is VERY hard to thread. 4-6 cores is another technological wall we've hit. Sure, most games launch like 28 threads but only Physics and Rendering actually use up a chunk of time. User input, sound, and all the other tiny stuff can all basically run on 1 core since they use very few CPU cycles (and a quad core at 3 GHZ has TONS of cycles). Rendering is very hard to multi-thread, a lot of games still only use 2 threads for rendering. I think they will use a 6 core just because they could dedicate 2 to have a robust in-game OS and leave 4 to games (which is a sweet spot in terms of performance and price). No reason to spend all that money to put a 12 core in when you wouldn't use half the cores anyways.
This is BF3 on a Core i7-2600k (4 cores with hyperthreading)
Graphs 1,3,5,7 are the physical cores, the rest of the hyperthreaded ones.
If you are interested in more BF3 CPU scaling pics, heres the link: http://www.techspot.com/review/458-battlefield-3-performance/page7.html
