Sponsored Feature: 'Resident Evil 5 Takes Full Advantage of Intel Core i7 Processors'

Author: by Staff

In today's sponsored feature, part of the Gamasutra Visual Computing microsite, Intel examines the debut of Resident Evil 5 for PC and how it's been adapted to work on the multithreaded Intel Core i7 processor. One of Capcom's goals with RE5 was to create fear even when the environment is bright and easy to scan for enemies, says the company's Christian Svensson: "A lot of horror games do horror in the dark," Svensson said. "It's easy, because people are scared of what they can't see. You can generate suspense about what is coming into the field of view given a very limited lighting condition. When you've got a completely bright African environment, creating that same level of suspense, or fear, is a very different challenge." And despite its generally console-centric reputation, Capcom is looking to expand further into the PC space and increase its investment there: Svensson noted that while Capcom has the most credibility as a console powerhouse, Capcom is also planning to expand its presence in the PC market, Svensson says: A few years back, if you thought of PC gaming and Capcom, you wouldn't actually use them in the same sentence. We're seeing that PCs have pulled so far ahead that basically they can do everything a console can do, at higher resolutions, and at 4x the frame rate. We've come a very long way, in our technology development, in marketing, in community outreach, to bring PC gamers into our family, and we've brought some of our biggest brands, in their best forms in many cases, to the PC." Svensson points to the power of a new generation of Intel processors as unlocking a growing wave of gaming potential. Freed from the single-thread world of limited possibilities, game developers can truly challenge themselves with interesting "what if?" questions. "What that brute strength and overhead in the new CPUs allows us to do is ask ourselves, ‘What are some of the things we couldn't do on a console that this horsepower now enables?'" "Some of the new things, like new shaders, DirectX 11 support, better lighting, better depth of field, higher resolutions, higher frame rates, are all possible now, and those are the nice, easy things . . . We just can't give that experience on a console. We think we're providing PC gamers something special and unique to them." You can now read the full sponsored feature at Gamasutra (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).