14 DAY TRIAL // Having won the hardware contracts for the latest Sony PlayStation 4, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox game consoles, Advanced Micro Devices is in a very interesting position.
And by that we mean that it can help lead to a future when developers have no trouble porting games from computers to consoles, or vice versa, as we have briefly mentioned here.
Right now, game companies have to create games in multiple incarnations in order for them to be available on all those media.
Porting is simpler than actually developing the engine and gameplay differently from the ground up, but it still eats resources, and impacts quality.
But now, with AMD’s hybrid processing and graphics hardware everywhere, there is much less need for new coding.
In other words, with AMD SoCs (system-on-chip devices) everywhere, game developers don't need to drop graphical quality or rearrange parts of the game.
Eventually, when smartphones and tablets become even more powerful than they are now, the intercompatibility net might grow to include them.
“If we can create a gaming experience on the console and client as well as in the cloud… we’re going to build our brand, we’re going to build our market share, we’re going to win,” said Matt Skynner, the corporate vice president of AMD.
“The end goal [is] to create a development ecosystem where first-party games will be written to the games consoles first,” AMD’s Lisa Su said.
We can definitely imagine makers of gadgets like Google Glass, and pretty much everything else that humans can interact with, becoming capable of more or less easily adapting existing games and other software.
Now all we have to wonder is what will happen to people who own a PC with an Intel CPU and/or NVIDIA graphics card. Since a lot of games are designed for the PC first, the impact will be minimal there. It will make it harder to port the titles to AMD-based consoles though.