m0ney said:
The new consoles have PC architecture. PC ports will be unoptimized only if the console versions are unoptimized. But devs and engines have gone long way during the last gen and PC ports are usually great now. |
They aren't much different than PS360. Going x86 won't make porting easier. The change that singlehandely made porting easy was the use of regular GPUs on PS360. A PowerPC or x86 CPU doesn't make any difference, the compiler will do the job for you.
And optimizing is fitting your code to a closed hardware spec. With the time, you know how to properly use the cache, how to better use your GPU, how to use previouns unused processing cycles to perform new operations. But that only works when you have ONE single spec. The new consoles won't help with PC optimization. The new consoles DON'T have PC architecture. They only replaced a Power CPU with a x86 one, for pretty much the same reasons that Apple did that years ago: x86 is as fast as Power and it's cheaper since it's mass manufactured. The x86 APUs just sealed the deal because now they could get a CPU and GPU in one die and it would be much cheaper.
Edit: PC ports aren't better now. PS4 and X1 made PC ports worse. PS360 were too weak, so even unoptimized ports would run easily on modern PCs. Now, the same unoptimized ports come from consoles with beefy specs and things are terrible. My GTX650 was running everything easily on high/ultra @ 1080p (including Crysis 3 and Metro: LL). Next gen port? Good luck. Evil Within is unplayable, Ryse onlyy at 900p on low, Far Cry 4 on medium, AC: Unity unplayable. Right now, my upgrade recomendation is: go overkill or future games will kill your rig. I'm going with the GTX970 because it's cheap and basically a "Titan slayer". And the price and low power comsumption can allow a future sweet SLI.
