Being a high-end PC gamer in a continually console dominated market is difficult. Sure, those with fancy rigs will get higher quality textures and resolutions, but the overall experience is similar. But now DirectX 11 is here, which will widen the gap further between console and PC. While it's unlikely that we'll see another game that pushes things as far ahead as Crysis did, the makers of the next Aliens vs. Predator game promise that PC gamers will enjoy a technical edge over those playing on consoles.
"The PC version of AvP is fully able to take advantage of the features of all the latest video cards and is optimized to make efficient use of multicore threading if your PC supports it," said David Brickley, senior producer at Rebellion, which is at the helm of the AvP game. "We will also be one of the first games to really show off how good DirectX 11 games can look, with hardware tessellation of the Aliens using displacement mapping, and Shader Model 5.0 Compute Shaders for post-processing effects."
Brinkley made his comments in an interview with PC Games Hardware, which focused mainly on the technical advantages of the PC over the console. On the topic of optimizing for those with multiple GPUs, Brinkley replied, "While in theory you could get a 100% improvement in performance with two matched GPUs, in practice it's never quite that simple. We're aiming for a minimum of a 50% improvement in performance - though it may be higher especially when GPU-bound.
"When developing the PC version we always have to keep multi GPUs in mind, as any effects that rely on the data from the previous frame (for example, a persistent motion blur, or using the previous frame's brightness for dynamic exposure control) will cause stalls as the data is passed between GPUs. We have to be careful to avoid any such problems."
Aliens vs. Predator is slated to release on the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 in February 2010.
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