Bennett Ring speaks to Neal Robison, Senior Director of Global Software Alliances, about the impact AMD’s unique CPU and GPU combo powering the next-gen consoles will have on the company place in PC gaming.

PCPP: Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first – can you give us an update on AMD’s stuttering issue?
Robison: The latest release of our drivers has addressed most of the issues that were brought to our attention. We spent time with engineering resources and feel we’ve gotten a grip on most of the issues many users have posted.

So totally fixed then?
Yeah, Absolutely. This was the focus of the last major driver release.

Glad we could get that out of the way. Onto the interesting stuff about your work with next-gen consoles and how it’ll impact PC gaming! With both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One using AMD’s Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, how will that impact performance on ports that feature on both consoles and PC?
I’ve been involved in game dev and the gaming industry for over twenty years, and this is the first time that I’ve ever seen this much alignment on architecture with the consoles and PC. For us, it signals a huge benefit that developers can really spend the time to create the content on the x86 architecture, and that’s going to work across both consoles and PC. Obviously, there are going to be optimisations for each one of those platforms, but overall this will help reduce a lot of time and cost in game dev that’s done today.

In terms of performance, though, do you think this will give your PC parts a benefit over NVIDIA in cross-platform games, and if so, what are the strengths of the GCN that NVIDIA can’t replicate?
You’re talking about the very basics of the game being coded to take advantage of the GCN architecture. If you start from that very base layer, if you have that same architecture in a PC, you’re going to get the best experience possible. We were chosen because the AMD GCN architecture was seen to be superior, giving better flexibility especially thanks to heterogeneous compute, using the graphics architecture for computation beyond standard graphics.
thought about putting it in hardware section, but it's really about gaming. Both PC and consoles.

Rest here

we'll see what kind of damage this does to nvidia.