In an interview with Gamasutra, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli denied the Sony assertion that it would take developers years to maximize the potential of the PS3, with Hirai stating that "We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?"
Talking in the wake of the announcement that EA would be publishing Crysis 2, Yerli said that "The interesting thing is we did run a performance analysis on the PS3 devkit, and you know the funny thing is the occupation on all the CPUs, the Cell and the GPUs, is pretty much – the needle is at the limit."
Here, he was implying that Crysis 2, running on the company's new CryEngine 3 would almost max out the PS3's abilities. "There’s not much more you can do," he added, "and frankly the breakthrough was very recent, and otherwise we would’ve had a compromised strategy on the consoles, which we don’t have now.
"So I think we will still have an upside, but we’re touching the hardware limits already. We do develop very very low level to get that performance out. Like I said, we started three years ago in the research of technology, and we had to dig very deep into the hardware to find the reserves, and say “oh we have 2% more here, and 1% more here,” and that allowed us actually to get to where we are."
Crytek is known for its technical excellence, and we also quizzed Yerli on his impressions of the differences between the two HD platforms. "I mean essentially the game we run is about the sam," he said. "Probably one’s stronger on the GPU side, one’s stronger on the CPU side, so depending on what you’re doing where, the PS3 does perform here sometimes better, the 360 performs other things better, but overall by the time the game ships it’ll be absolutely the same."
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"We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do..."
So they INTENTIONALLY want their 3rd party developers to be a tiny core group, and make things more difficult for that tiny group, AND they want their non AAA 3rd party developers to create games that don't look as good. At least that's what I get out of that statement.
I can make a game where perfing the gpu/ppu/spus on the ps3 shows 100% workload across the board, and it will still look and play like utter shit.
Now I don't think that Crysis 2 will be like that, but just because you managed to use and synch up all resources doesn't in any way imply that they are used well, or even doing the right things in relation to the game you are building.
Maybe that's why there's a inane TRC process that becomes impossible to ship a SCEA approved title through SCEE and vice versa? >:o)
Since they know each platforms performance limits it really comes down to the artists to hide the weaknesses and play to each platforms strengths as anonymously as possible.
I wonder if they have made improvements to the engine since GDC. Those graphics they demonstrated where astounding.
Just even breaking the 4 dynamic light barrier is impressive.
As Janne says, merely being able to utilize resources isn't impressive at all. The trick is minimizing waste, and I doubt anyone has done that enough to be able to claim that they're "maxing out" a console in any real sense.
It's not hard to max out anything! What IS challenging is doing amazing things within the limits. And that is MUCH more creative than just running some bench marks or looking at clock speeds.
It's about what kind of experiences we can provide. Hardware is one part of the equation, but not the only one. Just look at the Wii, heh, or even on the DS or the web in Flash! Amazing stuff is happening to games on very limited hardware.
Hardware doesn't sell games. Games sell hardware.