PS4 'is really easy to program for', Killzone developer reveals
Guerilla Games has spilled the beans on what it's like making games for the upcoming PlayStation 4, including how much memory it uses.
Killzone developer Guerilla Games has spilled the beans on what it's like making games for the upcoming PlayStation 4, and even divulged some tech specs, including how much memory it used in the demo it showed off at the new console's launch.
"PS4 is really easy to program for!" the developer's lead tech Michael Valient revealed in a detailed presentation published on its website. "[The] GPU is really fast! GDDR5 bandwidth is awesome!" he enthuses.
The gushing praise is backed up with stats: the demo for Killzone: Shadow Fall we saw at the PS's launch used 3GB of memory for graphics and 1.6GB for the system CPU. That raised eyebrows -- industry expert Richard Leadbetter, better known as Digital Foundry, tweeted, "Using 3GB of graphics is an eye-opener... and that's with FXAA (no multi-sampling)."
"Our aim for the announcement event was to run on PS4 hardware," Valient says, at "1080p, solid 30FPS, no cheats."
Guerilla also compared some of the graphics in Shadow Fall with Killzone 3, which it made for the PS3 in 2011. While the end result is perhaps not staggeringly different, you can see it's much more complex, which bodes well for the kind of realism and spectacle we can expect from the PS4.
It's important to note that Amsterdam-based Guerilla is wholly owned by Sony, so there's little chance this is a leak not intended for public consumption, and even less that it would have criticised the machine in any way.
"We wanted something fancier and faster, but were pleasantly surprised with the PS4 performance," Valient chirps.
It'll be interesting to hear what third-party devs think of the PS4, but Guerilla's revelations chime with what many thought of the console's PC-like architecture at launch. Sony will reveal more details about its new console at the huge E3 show next month, and hopefully even show us the thing too. Microsoft, meanwhile, will reveal its new Xbox at an event next week.
Here's a video of the presentation:
Will the PS4 blow the competition out of the water? Will the Xbox be just as good? Or are they all just fancy PCs anyway? Let fly in the comments, or over on our painstaking rendered Facebook page.