GAME DEVELOPERS: "It will take a while before game titles take advantage of PCI-Express."

What kind of advantages does PCIE (PCI-Express) offer for future games, and when will we see the first game titles take advantage of PCIE?

PCIE offers a much higher bandwidth connection and it also offers much faster data transfer speeds from video memory to system memory. It will take a while before game titles take advantage of this. Games still have to target the AGP platform. So, depending on any technique that relies on fast data transfers is going to be a problem on AGP platforms which will be a significant portion of the install base.

There will be other technologies like multiple PCIE boards and multiple PCIE slots that’ll indirectly cause games to take advantage of the PCIE bus.

How can game developers optimise the code for graphic chips which will be available in two or three years after the development start of a game.

This is a hard problem and something that ATI is very aware of. We work constantly with the top game developers. Our philosophy primarily is to develop hardware that does not require the ISV to do any special optimizations. Following the simple principles outlined in the API (Application Program Interface) is what we primarily recommend.

Developers who start a game today usually target some mid-to-high range product of today as their minimum spec. For eg:- several developers starting on new games this year are using Radeon 9700 as the minimum spec. My expectation is that our hardware 3 years from now is going to run all these games very very fast anways. Whether this game is optimized for our hardware 3 years down the lane may only be of “benchmarking” interest in many cases.