Insomniac says PS3 won't be maxed for at least another two years

by Xav de Matos on Oct 27th 2009 5:01PM

According to Insomniac's James Stevenson, the developer might not begin maxing out the PlayStation 3's power for at least two or three years. The senior community manager's comments (via CVG) are directed towards how efficient developers have become at using Sony's platform to develop its titles. Since it launched, the PlayStation 3 has been notoriously -- and perhaps erroneously -- described as difficult to develop for, but Stevenson applauds Sony for creating hardware with "really long life spans."

"We're using all of the PS3 right now," Stevenson says. "But you can always be more efficient in the way you use it." Insomniac's latest, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time arrives in stores Stateside today and will no doubt include some of the wackiest weaponry gamers have ever been privy to, regardless of how much of the Cell processor is needed to render 'em.

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Tags: hardware, insomniac, ratchet-and-clank, ratchet-and-clank-a-crack-in-time, resistance

Reader Comments (108)

It makes sense. Devs will always be learning how to better optimize the hardware. It's why Epic's claim that the '360 is maxed out' is BS. Just because the 360 is maxed out using their Unreal Engine doesn't mean another dev can't do better. And let's face it: The Cell is a beast. I think they'll be trying to tap its full potential for a while.

I'm a developer and completely agree. There's always people that finds new ways to optimize code. I think things will keep improving until no one develops for it anymore. Just check out the current 8-bit Atari or C=64 scene, I can't believe what some people has been able to do nowdays!

DirectX 11 might also change that for the 360 especially. Even though the GPU doesn't support a lot of DX11 features, the enhanced multithreading just needs a CPU with more hardware threads, which the 360 certainly has. People are expecting at least a 20-50% performance increase in areas.

ya the 360 hardware is severely underrated, for being a year early its extremely impressive. and the eDRAM gives the console a huge advantage. Hopefully the next xbox will have eDRAM large enough to store a 1080p image in a single pass.

DeepFried - doesn't it have 10MB of Embedded DRAM in the GPU? That's enough for 1080p I thought...

1920*1080*4 bytes per pixel => about 8.3MB. Or am I missing something?

Maybe he's talking about fancy tricks like the dual framebuffers that Halo 3 uses.

Bradwart.. I remember Epic saying they'd maxed the ram.. though I wasn't aware anyone was using the third core.. It'll be interesting when SMT is cracked, there's an extra 3 threads for 360, and 1 for PS3.. give it a couple of years, and developers will be doing more with the consoles than current, and be using less system.. just think back to the PSone days.. Tekken looked great when we first had it, but when Tekken 3 turned up, we saw how truly ugly T1 truly was

I think it was that it could hold about 1/4 of a screen for AA, but the RAM is so fast that it could so the 4 quarters without a noticeable lag. Regardless of what it's used for, just having 10 extra megabytes to do things with helps out with those consoles. At the least, the 10 megs could store instruction code.

As for maxing RAM, there's plenty of tricks that Microsoft can pull like procedural synthesis and better compression

Developers won't have more than 2 - 3 years to max anything out on the Xbox 360 because the Xbox 720 will be out and Microsoft will abandon the Xbox 360 and put all it's efforts into the Xbox 720. OR do you think Microsoft won't do that?

The better the coding gets the more they can do. trickery may be needed, but it does have time to be actually maxed out.

I hope to see something truly stunning on the PS3 because to this point I have only seen Drake's Fortune 1 and 2 that have blown my socks off.

MGS4, Killzone 2?

Killzone 2, while not as impressive as Uncharted 2, was still pretty damn impressive. Especially the LoS rendering. Valkyria Chronicles was very impressive as well. But other than that, there aren't a whole ton of "OMG HOWDEDODAT!" games on either console. (For 360, I'd say Mass Effect, Bioshock, and Halo 3 were all fairly impressive when they launched.)

i hate how MGS4 is always over looked because the cinematic story telling, maybe to those who never played a Metal Gear Solid series before can "meh" it, but to people like me it was the top 3 games this gen

Wait, there's a Drake's Fortune 2 now?

God of War, Heavy Rain, and The Last Guardian look equally impressive.

A lot of people think MGS4 is the best looking game on the platform, but in my opinion even the original Uncharted floors it.

How does Halo 3 make it on the impressive list? I admit the online elements may have been impressive but the game itself was much of the same in every way.

Halo 3 set a new record for draw distance (17 miles). That's impressive no matter how you look at it.

Wipeout HD and Prince of Persia come to mind as well. They may not be pushing the hardware quite as much as the others that have been mentioned, but they're still beautiful games. I think it's worth mentioning that you don't necessarily need to "max out" the hardware to make something pretty. Even games like Flower are good evidence of that.

I'd say killzone 2s graphically equal to U2:AT and maybe even a bit better in some ways they're both phenomenal in different ways for example killzone has better lighting and effect as well as ost processing but uncharted has better textures and character models as well as more detailed enviroments

damn my keyboards skipping keys oystiq needs an edit button :\

I like how the PS3 fanboys came in and downrated Bradwari's comment.
"How dare he come with GOOD information about a rival console! This is a PS3 article for christs sake! DOWNRATE NAO!"
Thats how I imagine most of these comments come to be downrated anyway.

Downrate massacre in 3, 2, 1...

He got downrated because he said Killzone 2 wasn't as impressive to look at as Uncharted 2, okay maybe so, of which I agree, but I'd be darned if it didn't look impressive in it's own respect, original? No, not really, but graphically impressive? Certainly had me on my toes.

He then went on to say that Halo 3 looked impressive......

@Darkfocus

I'd definitely say that Uncharted 2 has far better lighting than Killzone 2. But I do think that KZ2 has some better animation than U2. U2's is good, but is still kind of awkward in some places.

...during gameplay, I should have said. Uncharted 2's cinematics are second to none.

how can anyone argue over the lighting effects of kz2 and u2:at? have you forgotten about that part in u2 when he holds up the blue flame to follow the trail of blood? that was one of my first "zomg how'd they do that" moments in the game.

i may be one of only the few people who played kz2 AFTER u2 (since i only borrowed the game). i played them one after the other, and after playing u2, kz2's graphics just don't compare.

(oh and sorry for the spoiler, but if you're a comment reader on joystiq and you still haven't played uncharted 2, you deserve the spoiler)

You need to have your eyes checked. Have you've played any of the Ratchet and Clank games? Those blow Sonic Unleashed away graphically, and also use more colors. Oh, not to mention they play better. I've played both. Obviously you're sitting too far away to see the model resolutions and graphical detail of Sonic Unleashed by saying its one of the best looking. Maybe its because the game moves so fast and blurs everything that you don't have a chance to look at anything?

Insomniac just seem like a bunch of OK guys.

Eh I'd say that with Resistance. But the Ratchet and Clank series is as solid as ever. Sure it's not original now that it's on its millionth entry. But I'm guessing Naughty Dog will be doing the same thing with Uncharted in the near future.

Also Insomniac > Guerilla (all tech no fun).

By 'OK' I mean - positive, good, admirable, cool, I like them.

for the record... lol

Disco, why mention Naughty Dog? Mentioning them makes me miss Crash. Joystiq, Crash 2 is the greatest game of all time and Naughty Dog needs to reacquire the rights to the greatest franchise ever. Same goes for Insomniac with Spyro. And while we're on the subject of awesome old games, Croc 3 please.

Oh haha. My bad. I thought you meant "average".

It's -only- the 6th entry in 2 generations, chill out.

@Nathan, 100% behind you there.

@Disco, Lol dw, It did kinda come out that way.

@Nathan

the problem is, those 2 franchises have been driven into the ground by their new owners. getting the original devs to make new ones would still be received badly in terms of sales because of the rep that those 2 franchises got after having tons of bad games come out.

one of the main reasons i chose the Playstation 3, over the Xbox initially, was because i owned a PS1 and a PS2 both which lasted forever in my eyes.

True. Me the same.

This discussion of maxing out and what not, doesn't concern me. Keep pushing the envelope in originallity and fun, and if that is good,, push the visual boundary even more guys.

It's all good.

I owned a PS1 and PS2 as well, never owned an Xbox, but I chose the 360 over PS3 (at first!) because I was more interested in the exclusives, it was cheaper, and it came out sooner. Once the price went down, and more awesome games started coming out for it, I picked up a PS3 for what felt like a triumphant return.

I actually find no benefit in maxing out a console, its not maxing out thats important its how much you can put in it, that is what matters.

here here

Well said.

Yeah, when you design a game, going "I'm going to max out the console and make a great game!" will take a lot more time than saying "I'm going to make a great game, and to make it as high quality as I can". In fact, making a game to max out a console would risk making it more of a tech demo than a game.

In Sony's case, they are using their game studios as an R&D department. They also realized that they need to share more in order to compete with Microsoft.

b-b-b-b-but Uncharted 2 maxed it out remember guys? Knew that was BS then.

"We're using all of the PS3 right now," Stevenson says. "But you can always be more efficient in the way you use it."

It may be marketing, but at least it's consistent.

Hey what did you expect them to say? They want you to know you're buying the best damn game on the PS3 right now.

I think ND should have clarified that they had maxed it out as far as it could be at this point, not forever. Besides, there is always a bottleneck that can stop a console from being used to it's full potential. This gen, I'd say the main issue is the limited RAM these consoles have. 512MB is not enough anymore.

Did they really said "maxed out"? or did they say: "using all of ps3 capabilities"?

Cause they're different "approaches" in discussing the full potential of something.

But yeah, it was definitely BS. PR BS. If it helps sell, why not? :p

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/09/11/naughty-dog-maxed-out-the-ps3-with-uncharted-2/

Naughty Dog were talking about the Cell.

Uncharted 2 is the first game to use all of the Cell's SPEs at a single point in time (usually when the action is most intense).

Uncharted 1 only used a third of them at any one time.

Indeed they said maxed out. Fact is a fact. However as you may
know tmac, the more you get to know the coding process used to develop in a system, you will find more ways of pushing the machine.

Remember guys god of war and god of war II? No one was expecting those visuals in a ps2 game. And supposedly the machine had already passed its potential.

But its still PR bullshit nonetheless.

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Insomniac says PS3 won't be maxed for at least another two years

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