"It's funny," he said. "We often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it's very clear that the games don't look ten times as good."
It's not just developers who are frustrated by the prioritization of console versions. PC gamers, particularly those who enjoy the traditionally PC-centric first-person shooter genre, have expressed their annoyance on several occasions at the "consolification" of their favorite games. Recent Call of Duty games' lack of dedicated servers and Dragon Age II's accusations of being "dumbed down" for the console market are just two recent examples.
Huddy and many PC-focused developers are in favor of leaving behind technologies such as DirectX in favor of writing code to take direct advantage of PC graphics hardware. This will have the benefit of making individual titles look more distinct from one another and run more speedily, but will be much more challenging work for developers trying to make their titles work on as broad a range of hardware as possible.
It sounds from Huddy's words that both gamers and developers alike would be much happier with a world where PC gaming was its own distinct beast, rather than the boundary-blurring entity it is right now. This would be a return to how things were in the mid-90s, when PC gaming was constantly at the cutting-edge of gaming technology.
Are we looking at a return to those days? Given how profit-driven today's industry is, probably not -- it wouldn't make good business sense for triple-A publishers to exclude either PC or console gamers from the hottest new titles. But traditionally PC-centric developers like CryTek are certainly interested in the possibilities offered by Huddy's suggestions. Viva la revolución?
This article originally appeared on GamePro.com as PC gaming stifled by consoles
This story, "PC Gaming Stifled by Consoles, AMD Says" was originally published by GamePro.