Computer Topic - AMD's Mantle & Comeback

[d-dave]

http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/08/amds-r7-and-r9-graphics-cards-mantle/

 

So who'se up for some discussion about PC components and how they relate to next gen consoles?

 

AMD is the GPU (and CPU) for the PS4 and Xbox One.  In their newest PC GPUs and the console GPUs, they have a feature called Mantle.  It's a deeper coding language that allows developers to get more out of it.  It will allow game makers to optimize games for AMD GPUs like in the way they did for console games.

 

To clarify, the reason that console games still looked quite good for most of us for this long previous cycle is that developers were able to optimize their code to harvest every single bit of power from the PS3/360.  Now that AMD has it's products in all of the next get consoles, they want developers to be able to take that same level of fine tuning to PC titles.  Sounds pretty cool to me.  For years, PCs had A LOT more processing power than a console (several times) but it didn't proportionally scale better.  Like they had more than twice the computational power, but only looked 50% better kind of thing.

 

So I find this to be an interesting development in the gaming arena.  Are we going to see better quality games (questionable)?  Are we going to see better looking games (hopefully at least something!)?  What will Nvidia do to counter?  Oh the tale of technology is a fun one to watch.  Maybe one day I can afford to build a PC or afford a next gen console!