| aLkaLiNE said: Interesting stuff for sure. And as far as the unified memory pool goes, GDDR5 was chosen because of its high bandwidth correct? Going by the leaks then, It would be cost prohibitive to do a major CPU upgrade when they're supposedly increasing the throughout of the Ram, while the small incremental CPU upgrade may be "crutched" by the exponential increase in GPU via GPGPU Compute. That really puts 3rd parties in a sort of predicament regarding optimization. Do I spend the extra time coding for such a unified APU to hit certain targets, do I scale back certain assets, do I just make the title exclusive and focus solely on that architecture to reap the optimization benefits, or do I just say screw it and launch a bug ridden game.
In any case, Neo is sounding better and better. It's as if these consoles should be the real upgrade from 7th gen, and the X1/PS4 are the ".5's" |
I believe that the lack of a CPU upgrade may be motived by either costs (increasing the price by another 100 bucks) or simply because Zen wouldn't arrive in time.
As for 3rd parties, I don't really think that it will change too much. Exclusives tend to push the hardware and such, but thirdy parties are more direct. The chose a version as the lead. It may be any of them. If the game doesn't run nicely, cut corners until it does.
Basically, the take the PS4 game and decrease resolution for X1. Still not ok? Reduce some effects. Better than expected? Turn up some effects. PC version? Add some extra effects, better textures and call it a day. High end PCs will be subutilized, but it doesn't matter. These users can use the extra performance to increase resolution and/or fps and will also be happy. In the end, they aren't treating any platform badly. They just can't develop a game for each one. It would cost a lot and wouldn't really make it sell more. Crysis did it, Crytek almost went down.
Devs will make the game run on PS4. Then they will put it on PS4K and increase visuals in some areas while it is still running nicely. End of history.
Also, don't count on a major upgrade. It's not like PS4/X1 will look ".5" versions. It's more like: PS4K > PS4 >>>>>>>> PS3. I have a GTX 970. Let's suppose that I replaced it right now with a 1080. It packs more than double the punch. Games won't look a gen better. Higher res, maybe some supersampling and that's it. A simple test is get a PC game on ultra and put it on medium/high. It's not a very big difference. Better, for sure. Now put a PS3 game side by side and that will be one hell of a difference. For most 3rd party games, if you look the Digital Foundry comparisons, the X1, PS4 and PC versions aren't that different. The PS4K version will simply be more like the PC one.
Edit: Of course, if you don't have a new gen console and are thinking about getting one, buy the upgraded version. If you already have one, don't bother. Wait for the next gen.
