All I meant is that I wish you could choose more than one option.

And as for the poll...

That "Multi core processor support in the engine" is whipping "Implementation of one of the latest DirectX APIs" [...and I presume that infers DX11] means that a lot of people are really ignorant on the matter. The CPU ain't bringing the pretty and DX11's Tesselization alone is worth the price of admission.

...Also, with Tesselization Bethesda can quit including tons of needless polygons and make their make their engine run a whole lot smoother.

:rofl:

I don't get Bethesda's QA system. Daggerfall shipped with a ludicrous amount of bugs, I find Morrowind's executable crashing more often than any other TES game's, Oblivion is just missing tons of rudimentary little concepts, and all the DLC in Fallout feels less like mini-expansions and more like essential things that should have been in the game in the first place.

Oh, hardware tessellation. I still remember buying an ATI card about 7 years ago for its TruForm so mushrooms in Morrowind could look more rounded. ATI really couldn't let go of their pet idea.

But I'd say parallelism is more important than all those little improvement newer API brings. Bethesda's games had always been CPU-bounded, and feature a lot of gamelogic related bugs and stutters. Writing clean, multi-threaded game code should be the top priority for Beth programmers.

I've been very impressed by the smoothness of the Dragon Age engine and how well it takes advantage of multi-core processors. Hope Bethesda could do as much with their next game.

I was gonna say something very much along those lines, except i doubt they will use PhysX as someone pointed out they already use Havok, which is more widely supported

And as far as SLi and Crossfire support goes, i think it's 50/50 weither or not they add this support, but if you ask me its not really worth it anyway. What sensible person pays for a graphics card twice only to get about 10% performance increase on average, not me... ill stick to a GTX300 series card thanks


And your right, i felt a bit let down or cheated when playing oblivion, there i am walking around the wilderness and i have to load another exterior to go into a castle, they could have made that alot more immersive if you ask me, and as for real windows i think they can make semi real windows but i still cant see why in this day and age of computer graphics you cant open a door and walk in a house, no-one can say that's not possible

This isn't about "pretty" it's about function/optimization. Using 4 cores would definitely help that, especially since oblivion's main draw back was it's incredible bogging down of the CPU.

Also we all know it will have DX 11. its just a given, but none of us know whether or not they will add multicore support. It is not a given.

I still think http://www.overclock.net/ati/597046-dx11-vs-dx10-vs-dx-9-a.html is much more important than CPU power. I'd prefer that CPU requirements/recommended stay in the same area as FO3/Oblivion since then the CPU won't an issue. When an E6600 is recommended and that was ~5 years ago and even 2 cores on entry level quads are [at that time when ES:V is released] like that E6600 OC'd to 4.5GHz due to so many advances in the architecture over the years, that's a good situation. You don't want to knock having that kind of situation. Especially when Bethesda likes to be CPU intensive for no reason, Bethesda seemingly loves to do RPGs [as they seem to put a little intrinsic effort into it], but they seem to hate to code [and patch]. And sure DA:O and FarCry2 are examples of good multi-core... and you may get that, but Bethesda doesn't code well and are as likely to give a GTA4


.... and they don't patch very well.



I'll take DX11 and and the Devil I know.

No you are wrong about performance gain ratio. Adding second ATI card (I'm not very well informed about nvidia and SLI) gives you 80% performance increase. It even gets better the more you increase resolution (goes up to %90 percent @ 1920x1080). Adding third and fourth card increases less than 50% so they don't worth the price IMO. But 2 way crossfire is definitely a good solution for gamers and even for budget gamers. Get two budget cards, connect them together,rule the word!

If you lower the resolution (let's say 1024x768) there are no real gains but why on earth do you go and buy second card to play on low res?

SLI and Crossfire will exist more and more because both ATI and nvidia started to produce their TOP cards as dual GPUs. Since dual GPU cards still considered crossfied or SLIed, we can say there'll be great amount of multi card users. Heck, there's already lots of people having multi GPUs. Do you have accounts at overclocking forums like Tom's Hardware or Overclock.net? See people's signature rigs... A real gamer (or should i say enthusiast) looks to play in best possible way and get as much as fun out of the game. So what are they going to do if their single gpu hinders them to max out the game? Of course that's why multi GPUs are for.