BT: The Xbox processor will be multiple core, which at the time of Morrowind (2002) was a nearly unthinkable idea for a gaming PC or console. However, by the release of ES4: Oblivion (now 2006), the Pentium-D and Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processors will be even more common place. The Pentium-D EE even features hyperthreading on each core! Will Oblivion be written to make use of these new features on the PC? If so, have you determined how threads will be divided (by class, like AI, physics, etc, or by immediate priority where physics could dominate two threads if little AI is present)?

GC: Oblivion will absolutely benefit from a multi-processor or multi-core PC architecture. These improvements have largely been driven by our optimizations for the Xbox 360 hardware. We have built a dynamic thread management system that manages processor load by our specific direction and by priorities. Portions of physics, AI, loading, audio, and rendering tasks can all be moved to different threads to keep the overall load balanced. The net result for the end user is a smoother experience.

BT: On a further Xbox to PC issue, there has been much talk of ATI's Unified Shader Architecture in the Xbox 360. However, this technology is not available on PCs currently, and will likely not be until at least the release of Windows Vista at the end of 2006. So will this be a benefit to Xbox users that they have it, or will there be no visible difference in speed for PC users? Will the PC version require being patched to make use of this if and when the technology shifts?

GC: The unified shader architecture definitely does help with the speed of shader processing. Plus, it's completely transparent to developers as the optimization all occurs behind the scenes on the hardware side of things. However, we've optimized our shaders so that the overall difference between Oblivion running on the Xbox 360, and Oblivion running on a fast PC with a Shader Model 3.0 card should be slight. We're locking the framerate at 30fps on the 360 so you probably won't see framerate improvements vs. the PC, but you might see a more stable framerate.