In a recent interview, Insomniac’s Brian Hastings discussed his opinions on the PS3’s hardware and how gaming on the PS3 will develop in the future.
“The amount of action we’re able to put on the screen at 60 frames per second really dwarfs what we were able to do a year ago at 30 frames per second,” said Hastings. “What’s most exciting is the way things are headed right now I think we’ll see just as big a leap from our second generation engine to our third as we did from the first to second.”
When asked about the PS3’s cell processor and the SPU, Brian had the following to say: “Collision and physics are entirely running on SPUs now, which allows us to put much more on the screen at once than we were able to with Resistance. Moving more and more code to the SPUs is an ongoing process and I think we’ll continue to see major benefits from this for several more years.”
Check out the full article at Videogamer here.
With these comments from Insomniac and the comments made by Naughty dog recently it sounds like the PS3 has a lot of untapped potential.
[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerptInsomniac’s Brian Hastings - “Major leaps in PS3 visuals†15 Nov In a recent interview, Insomniac’s Brian Hastings discussed his opinions on the PS3’s hardware and how gaming on the PS3 will develop in the future. “The amount of action we’re able to put on the screen at 60 frames per second really dwarfs what we were able to do a year ago at 30 frames per second,†said Hastings. “What’s most exciting is the way things are headed right now I think we’ll see just as big a leap from our sec [...]
Pingback by My Personal Blog » Insomniac’s Brian Hastings - “Major leaps in PS3 visuals†— Nov 15, 2007 @ 2:49 pm
All Playstations have had untapped potential and the PS3 is no exception. If you compare games first released for the PS1 or PS2 to the games they released at the end of the lifecycle massive leaps in visuals etc were made, its going to be no different for the PS3 as 2008 will show……
Comment by Nathaniel — Nov 15, 2007 @ 3:07 pm
2008 and into 2009 will start to show some really top rate visuals coming out of the PS3 that may quite possibly shame X360 as a competitor. If this is the case I would expect Microsoft to release a newer console.
Games like Killzone 2, MGS 4 and GT5 have only just started to scrape the surface of potential from the PS3. It will be a very exciting time this time next year.
Comment by EpicTel — Nov 15, 2007 @ 3:20 pm
Nathaniel, spot on mate. i’ve been saying that since day one of the ps3.
it’s like the xbox and the gamecube hit the capability-ceiling pretty quick. then you’ve got the ps2 coming out with stuff like godhand, god of war 2 and okami right at the end of it’s life.
i think with ps3 they have magnified that approach. i wouldnt be suprised if the ps3 keeps up with the successor to the xb360 for a while…..
Comment by d33p — Nov 15, 2007 @ 3:25 pm
In an interview I read last night with the Naughty Dog devs, they reckon they are only using about 30% of the PS3’s power at the moment. If this is true, then the PS3 will show some amazing stuff in the next couple of years.
If it’s not true and closer to say 50 or 60% it still means that there is some amazing stuff to come from the PS3.
Also keep in mind that in it’s first year the PS3 is matching the Xbox 360’s capabilities. Sure they are different beasts to program for, but it looks to me like the PS3 has more legs.
My only wish is that Sony would make it as easy for the hobby developer to write stuff for the PS3 as Microsoft has done for the 360 using XNA.
PS. See when the pain killers kick in, I can be more civil.
Comment by Savage — Nov 15, 2007 @ 4:03 pm
It’s like Crash Bandicoot to Final Fantasy 9
Dynasty Warriors 2 to Shadow of the Colossus
I agree totally with Post 4 - this year is the pinnacle of the 360 in terms of what it can produce, we have Halo3, Mass Effect and Gears - all beautiful games…which have been in development since the consoles inception in late 2005 - that is what the console has shown us.
Compare those titles to Heavenly Sword, Uncharted, Demo of MGS4 - as was stated in a previous ThreeSpeech article
“I Don’t think the 360 could do this”
Note: JohnSketch is in no way a Fanboy, he owns all current consoles and enjoys drinking Westons Cider (export) whilst watching Battlestar Galactica and playing with his EyeToy.
Comment by JohnSketch — Nov 15, 2007 @ 4:08 pm
The X360 has 3 CPUs, sitting side-by-side. So, it has plenty of untapped potential also.
Does anyone want to wager how good GoW2 or Halo4 or Bioshock2 will look, in contrast with their ‘first gen’ engines?
Game engines are not written overnight and once you start down a particular route, you cannot throw it away, just because you’ve cracked something and can do it better now than six months ago, when you first started writing the code.
So, time is relative in this case and is in no way an accurate indication of how things will turn out. It’s about how quickly developers become knowledgeable about each console.
I’m not being negative here about PS3, I’m trying to be balanced (I own a PS2 and PSP, afterall), so I don’t think anyone can discount the X360 just yet.
Sony can only win by being innovative (but not in the kiddy way that Nintendo has, PLEASE!) with the games it nurtures and making them have that PlayStation magic that seems not only alien but very barren from X360 games. I think they’ve slightly forgotten to do that recently.
All I read here are sighs of relief from PS3 owners - as if such comments from developers and games like Uncharted and Ratchet & Clank are saviours and justifiers for the extortionate amounts spent on buying into the Sony third gen dream.
I just hope it doesn’t become a nightmare…
Comment by Zed Zee — Nov 15, 2007 @ 5:27 pm
[...] When reports like this come from any developer, we listen. But when that developer has wielded the PS3’s graphical capabilities to levels we’d only hoped for so soon since its release, we experience a warming flutter of tachycardia. Major leaps in PS3 visuals for at least four more years [via threespeech] [...]
Pingback by blog free online game » Blog Archive » Insomniac’s PS3 Visuals Are Just Getting Started [Good News] — Nov 15, 2007 @ 7:12 pm
these leaps and bounds have seemed to always happen for playstation consoles. Games like GT4 on the PS2 look as good as first generation games on the 360. And while the quality seems to be getting better and better on the PS3, now being slightly better than what I have seen on the best 360 titles, Microsoft wil undoubtedly be putting out their newest console the 720 or whatever, in a couple years, while the PS3 has years of growth potential. The 360 seems to have hit a wall, basically because they don’t have space on DVD’s to put anything better.
PGR4 proved that when the devs said that if they wanted to add in all the effects or realistic weather and whatnot, they would need to make the game multi-dvd, so they just left that stuff out. When you can have all that stuff run on independent processors and can fit it all on to your medium, blu-ray in this instance, the sky is the limit. Now they just need to put a gig of ram in the stupid thing and all the lazy developers won’t have anything to complain about.
Comment by Josh — Nov 15, 2007 @ 11:06 pm
Another thing to keep in mind is you can’t judge performance over what percentage of the Cell and SPUs you use (and same for the CPU and GPU of any other machine)… as I’ve noticed some people like to ask questions like “How many SPUs are you using and how much Cell power is being used”.
I’m pretty impressed with Naughty Dog’s Uncharted profiling showing that they’re only using about 30% of the SPUs, but that’s really tied to that specific code.
A game I worked on years ago was pretty much pushing machine to its limits around 95% CPU and graphics usage.. but then a few months after that I made something even more impressive that only used about 60% - as I found better ways to structure the code and pipe the graphics through.
You can write a routine that does a job in 10 calculations.. then later find a way to do the same thing in 7, or at a smarter time in the frame drawing cycle. It’s the same result in the end but you use less processing time, leaving room for other things.
I also once modelled a tree that used about 400,000 polygons and it looked absolutely hopeless compared to 10,000 poly tree somebody else made.
As long as developers keep finding clever ways to optimise code further, I reckon we still have a long way to go on all 3 consoles before we see their full potential.
Comment by Rick — Nov 16, 2007 @ 12:21 am
I agree more with “Rick” than “Josh”, although to think that something just looking good is enough is a somewhat flawed but possibly understandable from a developer’s point of view (when you’re working on something every day and seeing it improve gradually), as ultimately consumers decide whether the game is worthwhile, regardless of the technical prowess put into it.
The only thing that will kill the X360 before its natural life-cycle is Microsoft. Nothing else in its specification can be seen as a crippling limitation, as per my post (7).
Over & Out.
Comment by Zed Zee — Nov 16, 2007 @ 5:22 pm
You all think CPU’s are as important as GPU’s for graphics, maybe they should name it something other than Graphics Processing unit then?
sure you can put things onto SPE’s, and the Cell can handle animation, physics etc, but is the texture memory and resolution going to be better than 360 - i don’t know
Thing is, atm there is not anything on PS3 that 360 could not do lets be honest (insomniac’s and naughty dogs games look stunning but not moreso than unreal engine 3)
So, there’s only the examples that are out there, and there are 2 where PS3 is not a port. Call of duty 4 is even stevens, both consoles running super smooth. And Assasins creed which freezes on PS3 (but most likely due to firmware 2.0 not the games)..
So it’s caught up now, finally, but it’s not exactly streaking away
Thing is, both consoles use tech that is now a few years old, they are both fixed with DirectX 9, top PC games like Crysis use DX10 to stunning effect….there is already a game out there on PC that without lots of technical trickery, is requiring hardware and software above and beyond what PS3 and 360 have..
This mythical ‘unlocking of extra power’ is rubbish, with better dev tools developers will make games look better on the same hardware, still not using every ounce of power…myself i think unlocking the potential of machines is a myth, they are unlocked right away, the games of 08 will just look better than those of 07, and so on and so on, there’s no more power there, they’ll just compress, make clever things like normal maps requiring less polys, that kind of thing
Comment by Basil Brush — Nov 19, 2007 @ 4:40 pm
You know, some of you are seriously blinded by the fact that Microsoft’s Xbox360 has something called the XDK and uses XNA architecture. It’s basically a branch off of DirectX that is used for both Xbox and PC games. This makes developing for the Xbox360 and the previous Xbox MUCH easier since these tools run almost with no issues on Windows machines and kills “two birds with one stone”. Sony on the other hand has to issue their own specific SDK to their developers who actually have to re-write code to be used in the PS3/PS2/PS1/PSP. It’s not a simple task. For those of you ragging on devs or Sony for that matter, you guys need to look beyond “oh sony promised this with PS2 and it never happened so it won’t happen with PS3″. Give both the PS3 a year to mature and it should be close to what the Xbox360 is putting out but the 360 might also be tapped into more than it is now which is a problem for Sony.
Comment by John — Dec 21, 2007 @ 12:56 am
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