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We approached a number of developers on and off the record - each of whom has helped to ship multi-million-selling, triple-A titles - asking them whether an Intel or AMD processor offers the best way to future-proof a games PC built in the here and now. Bearing in mind the historical dominance Intel has enjoyed, the results are intriguing - all of them opted for the FX-8350 over the current default enthusiast's choice, the Core i5 3570K.

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So in theory, chips from both vendors should easily outperform the next-gen consoles, but AMD has the potential to offer more performance at the same price-point - as Avalanche Studios' Chief Technical Office, Linus Blomberg, tells us.

"I'd go for the FX-8350, for two reasons. Firstly, it's the same hardware vendor as PS4 and there are always some compatibility issues that devs will have to work around (particularly in SIMD coding), potentially leading to an inferior implementation on other systems - not very likely a big problem in practice though," he says.

"Secondly, not every game engine is job-queue based, even though the Avalanche Engine is, some games are designed around an assumption of available hardware threads. The FX-8350 will clearly be much more powerful [than PS4] in raw processing power considering the superior clock speed, but in terms of architecture it can be a benefit to have the same number of cores so that an identical frame layout can be guaranteed."

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"This (Sony) approach of more cores, lower clock, but out-of-order execution will alter the game engine design to be more parallel. If games want to get the most from the chips then they have to go 'wide'... they cannot rely on a powerful single-threaded CPU to run the game as first-gen PS3 and Xbox 360 games did. So, I would probably go for the AMD as well, as this might better match a console port of a game... based on what we know so far."

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"I think we can assume that most games will use a majority of the 8GB for graphics resources, so I'd go for as much GDDR5 on the GPU as possible," says Avalanche's Linus Blomberg.

"For the CPU I'd say at least 8GB DDR3, depending on how much stuff you'll have running in the background. But this is a tricky one! In Avalanche Studios' upcoming titles we'll use a lot of tricks that take advantage of the unified memory layout. But on high-end GPUs there will be ways of compensating for that, to some extent at least."

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Others sound a more cautious note:

"Replicating the 8GB unified ram of the Sony console will be impossible," another well-placed source tells us.

"The problem with Windows is that there is always a DirectX type 'layer' between the game and the actual hardware. This marshals and controls the movement of textures/shaders/vertices from the main PC memory to the memory on the GPU. Unless PC games programmers get direct control of the hardware (very unlikely), you will always be fighting against this issue. You never know where your textures are and when they will be uploaded to the GPU, which can cause stalls or micro-stutters in a frame as resources are shunted between the memory types."

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And again, similar to the CPU recommendations, we see consensus from all of our sources on how to best future-proof your PC in this respect - buy a graphics card "with as much memory as you can afford".

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"Not all games will provide you with the option to go from 30 to 60FPS, as it's an architectural challenge too and usually comes with other drawbacks," says Avalanche's Linus Blomberg. "But if they do, it will always be a trade-off between resolution and frame-rate. A PC card will most often have higher FLOPS, but you'll also typically run at a higher resolution. If you'd stick to 720p, as on most console games, then 60FPS should definitely be feasible. In my opinion 720p at 60FPS provides a superior visual improvement compared to 1080p at 30FPS."

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