Why Consoles Will Be Good For PC Gaming
Games will run on multi-core Playstation 3 consoles as well as on dual-core PC platforms.
When Intel introduced HyperThreading a few years ago, the opportunity for game developers to take advantage of the capability of multi-threads in a single-core processor was limited to Intel platforms. With both Intel and AMD coming on board with dual-core devices, programmers are looking at a future where almost all PC systems will have eventually adopted a dual-core platform.
The advent of the new Xbox and PlayStation 3 with multi-core processors will create that much bigger a multi-core market for game developers.
"With this generation of games, a lot of games will be cross-platformed for PC and consoles. So the economics of game development has led to it being more common for guys to ship more products as possible," Intel's Pallister said. "With the next generation of game consoles coming out, which are multi-processor boxes, game developers must create applications that in order to be competitive and look their best, will need to be multi-threaded on all the platforms they are targeting. Suddenly the incentive gets that much bigger."
PC gamers are well acquainted with the disappointment of almost cut-and-paste versions of PlayStation or Xbox games that are poorly adapted for the PC platform, such as the recent release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for PC. There is thus a chance that games written for multi-core console platforms will lend themselves better to the PC experience.
"The big difference now going over to the next generation is that we are seeing multi-core processors on the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, with a lot more CPU and graphics power. Both systems are significantly more powerful than the big-money PCs you can build today," Epic Games' Rein says. "So what is exciting is when people go to create games for those environments, to take advantage of what those systems can do. Now, for example, instead of having single hardware threads for the Xbox, they are going to have two or maybe four hardware threads."
