Yes, Gears 4 will most certainly look better than every other game despite it being Black Tusk's first game and despite it being on weaker hardware than all the PS4 games. Definitely no other contender.

sarcasm

Sadly you have a point.

Uncharted 3 was one, beautiful grind for me. Clunky is the perfect word. I hope they improve it. 

Terrible wording on the poll question.

What is this?

You telling me to get more info before discussing graphics then you go on to tell me that the 7850 is a decent gpu? How ironic. 

Mantle has already shown what it can do. Its not about boosting the performance of gpus, its about getting rid of the cpu bottleneck. That is to say a AMD 7850k with a Radeon 290x would get almost the same performance as a I7 3770k with a 290x. Currently with dx11 and prior, this is not the case. The 7850k would be a bottleneck because it wouldn't be fast enough to feed the 290x. This is why with mantle when its used with a high end cpu and gpu, there is no huge performance gains. Because the cpu is already fast enough to feed the gpu. 

In other words if mantle continues to take off, it will make it so that one just has to focus on upgrading their gpu instead of worrying about getting a high end cpu and gpu. Google battlefield 4 and thief mantle benchmarks. The high end gpu/cpu performance doesn't matter, pay attention to the low end cpu with high end gpu benchmarks. Because that is what matters. 

And yes, the mantle api is similar to what is in consoles. How do you think its possible for the ps4/xo to have weak jaguar cpus but be able to pump out decent graphics. With a low level api, the cpu is no longer the bottleneck. 

Also, your statement about AMD drivers being bad is so outdated. When is the last time you built and gamed on a pc? 2001? Both Nvidia and AMD can have bad drivers. I own hardware from both and I've personally had more issues with Nvidia. But man, that kind of statement shows how out of touch with PC you are. And for you its more so about parroting and identification with your console system. You can't be a objective thinker if you are defending something as if its a part of you.

CPUs aren't the bottleneck on PCs. Of course, if you can pump their performance, it's a good improvement. But it isn't the big issue here. I myself game with a almost 5 year old Phenom II 955 and it isn't an issue. I've already considered upgrading it, but benchmarks actually show that I would get more marginal upgrades (it would be better to grab a high-end cooler or watercooler and overclock it). A good AMD FX 8-core CPU is pretty cheap. Even with that, I would do a better service to myself using that money to replace my GTX650 with a beefier card. I don't think most gamer are thinking about using Titans with a Core i3 to make that a revolution simply because decent CPUs are several times cheaper than decent GPUs.

Despite that, PS4/X1 CPUs don't have to directly feed GPUs. In a PC the CPU have to grab data from RAM and feed the GPU so it can copy it to its memory. PS4 (I will use it as an example because I'm more informed about its architecture, despite the X1 being similar) simply has every info on an unified pool so both the CPU and GPU can use it, with two memory buses, one for the GPU with a higher bandwidth and one that both can use with lower bandwidth. So the CPU can't become a bottleneck when feeding the GPU simply because it won't need to feed it. The GPU can go there and use what it wants.

The last time I built a PC was at the end of 2013 since I bought my motherboard, new tower and new RAM and just added my old CPU and GPU (this one not that old, got it in the beginning of 2013 with a new PSU) and I'm gaming on it, of course. And about AMD, I'm a AMD fanboy. I love AMD CPUs and when I replace my Phenom I will simply grab whatever high-end CPU AMD (it's way better to buy a high-end AMD one than a mid-end since I will be able to keep it for years without upgrading). What I don't like is theirs graphics drivers. Just looking at recent examples, Watch Dogs and Wolfestein had several issues with AMD GPUs and they aren't the first games to have it. Another good example is when looking at multi-OS benchmarks: while NVidia presents regular performance between Win/Linux/Mac, AMD simply floats like crazy. That's because the Nvidia driver simply shares 80% of the code between platforms. And that shows that it's a more mature code that works better. Despite that, in general Nvidia is the one pushing new techs: ray tracing, CUDA, mobile GPUs. When AMD ups their game here, I will gladly join their boat. Before that, it will be AMD CPU + NVidia GPU for me.

I had to scroll up to check which thread I was in ...

Thats not what I'm saying. I'm saying with respect to game performance weak cpus become a bottleneck. I can't recommend anyone who has lets say a Phenom II 955 to get a modern gpu such as a 280x as a upgrade. I would tell them that while their performance will be hindered since the 955 can't adequately feed the 280x. This is factual!

The good thing about Mantle and perhaps DX12 is that this is no longer the issue. Its quite expensive to have to buy a new motherboard, ram and gpu just to be up to date. With Mantle you would just have to buy a Amd gpu. So money that would be spent on a mb and cpu could be put towards a good gpu. That is a good deal and opens up the door for many more end users to enjoy respectable performance in games. The only problem at this time is Mantle is AMD exclusive.

With your example on the PS4 architecture, I don't think its that simple. In the system can still be cpu limited. I'd say the only game that is available at this time that is cpu intensive is FF14 and in comparison to PC it struggles to maintain high fps. But for the hardware PS4 is using, its doing a good job delievering the goods. If a PC with dx used the same hardware it would peform signifcantly worse than its PS4 counter part. With Mantle it would probably be able to push out similar numbers as found on consoles.

If you feel you got a grasp on the ps4 hardware, then you should know about the x1 hardware. They are virtually the same save for the fact that M$ choose ddr3 for memory. Everyone should already know what that does to the gpu peformance.

Of course, if I would get a GPU like that I would really think about a new CPU. The reason to keep it is that high-end CPUs (when I bought the 955 the only AMD CPU above it was the 965, but that's just a 955 with a 0.2 GHz overclock using the same stock cooler and I would never pay for something I could do myself) hold their own nicely over the years. An overclock would probably give me some more time with this CPU. Of course, it isn't a new CPU now and after 5 years it would surelly deserve a rest.

About Mantle, I agree with that: AMD exclusivity is a problem. I think that if DX12 delivers a close, good enough, result compared to it, it will become the norm and Mantle will have problems. Good news anyway since it is avaiable for any combinations of CPU + GPU vendor.

PS4 can be CPU limited, of course. I was only saying that the GPU won't suffer with problems related to CPU capacity to feed it. AI, Physics and any other CPU oriented task will need to be careful. Games like FF14 probably suffer from bad optimization and last gen oriented development. With PS4 and X1 we will start to see more "next gen thinking" applied to development and PC games will take advantage form this new techs too, so it's gain-gain for everyone.

About X1, I totally agree. DDR3 really is a bottleneck (I used to have a GT240 with DDR2 memory, but I really don't like to remeber this dark times). Both are AMD APUs with an unified memory pool but with a EDRAM cache on X1 to compensate the lack of bandwidth from the DDR3 memory. Of course, the EDRAM bandwidth is just a little better than the GDDR5, so it isn't doing much of a magic, but it definitively helps.

It would be nice if they used the cover mechanics from TLOU, where you just take cover if you are crouched close to an object but it isn't a sticky cover like UC. Specially on MP, it feels way more natural and you can get in/out of cover pretty fast and without getting stuck in the wrong cover.

Yes! For one thing...

For me to buy it they would have to significantly improve the aiming and hit detection. Significantly.