Oxide Games likes PS4 architecture “very much”
Speaking with Gamingbolt, Dan Baker, one of the founders of Oxide Games, spoke very favorably of the PS4 architecture engineered by Sony, wishing that PCs could have DDR5 RAM as well.
We like the PS4 architecture very much. In fact, we’d love to see PCs with DDR5 RAM on them because according to our analysis memory speed is an issue even for the CPU. Once you put a GPU on the same die, you need that much more bandwidth
He also confirmed that there is no need for Mantle on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One since they are both already able to access the GCN architecture at a low level:
Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have APIs for accessing the GCN architecture directly, so Mantle in itself isn’t needed for that. The main advantage Mantle gives us is the ability to have console-like performance, particularly in batch performance, on the PC. At AMD’s recent developer summit, Oxide demonstrated a PC running at over 100,000 batches per frame. Before now, this type of performance on a PC was unheard of.
Oxide Games is a small studio born out of veterans from Microsoft and Firaxis (such as Dan Baker, who previously worked as Lead Graphics on Civilization V) who decided to develop the Nitrous Engine, which will be mainly optimized for strategy games. Oxide Games previously announced that Nitrous Engine has been designed from scratch to be a 64-bit multi-core engine, thus capable of rendering “epic numbers of units and light sources on a screen at any given time”; they also announced their support for AMD’s new API, Mantle.
Right now no game has been confirmed to be in development with Nitrous, but we already know that Stardock will be using it since they provided the seed capital for the studio as part of the Stardock Strategic Investment Fund (after all, Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, is also one of the founders of Oxide Games); moreover, Galactic Civilizations III has been announced to be in development exclusively for 64-bit PCs. Just by connecting the dots, it’s easy to see that Stardock will use Nitrous in GC III.
