Naughty Dog 'maxed out' the PS3 with Uncharted 2

by David Hinkle on Sep 11th 2009 2:20PM

Despite the copious amount of gigglebytes and Dilithium Crystals under the hood of the PS3, it's never enough for developers. Their lot is constantly pushing envelopes and raising bars everywhere they go -- and the fine folks at Naughty Dog are no exception. During a preview of Uncharted 2 at PAX, Naughty Dog's Amy Hennig commented that the first Uncharted game only managed to utilize a third of the PS3's power, but Naughty Dog has "maxed it out" for the sequel.

This is something Naughty Dog achieved by taking a lot of the processes on the main processor and shifting them onto the SPUs (which may be one of the reasons why it could never work on Xbox 360). This allowed the developers to significantly increase the quality of the animations and other aspects of the game, leaving the main processor to "focus on getting all of that richness in the backgrounds." Well, whatever that means, we're glad they did it. This game is purty.

Head past the break to watch the video interview -- around the 3:37 mark is where she starts talking about the powah of the PS3.

Source

Tags: naughty-dog, pax-2009, uncharted, uncharted-2, uncharted-2-among-thieves

Reader Comments (202)

It use to be near the ending life of a system that games would max out a system, it looks as the PS3 has had a few games so far including Uncharted 2 do just that. Will this mean that Sony may have to make a more powerful system.

I think the only thing I dislike about my PS3 is the loading of most of my games to play them and when I also have to extract a demo after I spent all day downloading it.

Sorry went off topic, it's great to see companies making more solid games for this system and sure enough.... Naughty Dog has done that with every game they make.

@pat:

"In other words, "maxing out" here means that they are using all the capabilities of the hardware. And that is actually great since it shows that the Cell and the entire structure of the PS3 works just like Sony claimed years ago."

Yes, Sony weren't lying on this one (the one thing where they didn't lie!), BUT the console is still not powerful enough to run these incredible games in native 1080p like Sony said it would be, the only "True HD" console.

Heck, even MGS4 doesn't even run in HD, it's something like 1024x768 or something around there.

I think this game looks breathtaking but I wish it could run in native 1080p but I'm sure that's impossible.

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