I heard this pitch behind closed doors with AMD during E3 back in June as the company talked about its upcoming Radeon cards, the new Never Settle Forever tiers and APUs residing in the new consoles. PC gaming will get a boost from the new generation of hardware because the platform will no longer be a second thought now that all three are basically on the same page. Sure, each platform will have their unique selling points (proprietary features), but from here on out, development shouldn't be such a pain in the… um, backside.
Matt Skynner, the company's Corporate Vice President and General Manager of AMD's Graphics Business Unit, reassured PC gamers in an interview with Forbes that the days of neglect are likely over. The PC gaming segment is alive, it's doing well, and growing. With the new generation, the architectures are similar, therefore development costs are reduced, and much easier to create multi-platform games than before.
"The new consoles too triggered a rush in game engine development," he said. "Anytime developers are spending new effort and new focus on designing new engines, then of course they're going to release PC games that feature these technologies."
"When consoles are first launched, games are first developed on console and then ported to PC," he added. "Because it's our architecture there, it's easier to port the games. And because they're first developed on our hardware, there should be a performance advantage. They should run better on our hardware. So if we can create that performance advantage on the PC, from a graphics point of view, then we can give our customers a better gaming experience and grow our market share."
He also talked about our hands-on of the Radeon HD 7990 in CrossFire after Forbes called the article "scathing." Chris wanted to find out how these massive cards coexist both acoustically and thermally within the same Cooler Master HAF X enclosure. With two retail cards installed and running Unigine's Heaven for three or four minutes, the GPUs were hitting the 102-degree protection point. Far Cry 3 crashed after heating up to 98 degrees. Even more, Chris also talked about a single 7990 card having frame pacing issues back in April.
"MAINGEAR proved that CrossFired 7990s is a perfectly viable option for enthusiast gamers," Skynner said. "It's a solution they've been shipping to the market for a while. With regards to performance, we've already released the AMD Catalyst 13.8 driver which addresses the frame pacing concerns outlined in that article. I think we've done an excellent job of addressing everything in that article. Today the 7990 is unequivocally the fastest video graphics card on the market."
The Q&A goes on to talk about the upcoming press event regarding the next-generation Radeon series, the Never Settle Forever bundle, the future of APUs and more. To read the full interview, head here.
