Swedish developer DICE has gone on record saying that it knows what to expect from Microsoft and Sony’s next generation consoles, and that the PC version of Battlefield 3 is a taste of things to come in the next gen console space.
Which is all very well, except that in all likelihood those consoles won’t see the light of day for another three years, which means that the consoles will be about three years behind current cutting edge computer hardware.
“At least. Probably more, because it’s classic PC technology. We know everything about multi-threading now. We know everything about multi-graphics card solutions now. If someone built a console where the specs are that or more, we have the technology to do something. We could port the game to that console tomorrow,” said Battlefield 3 executive producer Patrick Bach in an interview with Eurogamer.
“There’s nothing we know about now that the new consoles would do differently, rather do more,” said Bach, going on to explain that they will offer “More processors. Bigger memory pools. Everything we have and more.”
“The big step is to go from single processor to multi-processor. Single graphics card to multi-graphics card. To multi-memory. Do you do multiple memory pools or one memory pool? Since we can handle both consoles now, we control that as well. We have all the streaming systems. We have whatever we might need for the future.”
“I would be surprised if there were something we couldn’t do with the next-generation of consoles,” said Bach.
Crysis 2 developer Crytek has also previously told Eurogamer that the current standard of cutting edge DirectX 11 graphics is roughly what we can expect the next generation of consoles to achieve.
So a console capable of matching a high-end gaming PC for power sounds great, but how would these specs affect pricing?
After all, a PC capable of running Battlefield 3 with all the bells and whistles is going to cost you in excess of R15,000.
Bach believes that these consoles will be far cheaper than equivelent PC hardware, saying “If you optimise things and say, instead of building 10,000 of these graphics cards we want 50 million of these graphics cards, it’s like, wait a minute, we can push the price down to zero. Then you get a cheaper console. So if you take this PC technology and just mass produce it for consoles you will get a much lower price.”
Battlefield 3 is due out on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 this week Friday, 28 October.
Battlefield 3 on PC a taste of next gen consoles << Comments and views
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