Naughty Dog has seemed to have gotten the most out of the Playstation 3 hardware with their recent pulp-action Uncharted 2, but the developer isn’t chomping at the bit for any new machines any time soon. C0-president Evan Wells recently spoke with G4 about the possibility of a PS4, and their comfort level with the current hardware generation.
“We’re pretty comfortable with the PS3, and we made a very big advancement between the first game and the second game; we’re really tapping into the Cell processor, but there’s more there. The first game, it was idle about 70 percent of the time, which we rectified for the sequel, and now it’s at least busy 100 percent of the time, but it’s still not fully-optimized code. I mean, in order to get to that 100 percent, it was more about making sure the pipeline was filled, and we weren’t running into one of the processors becoming idle because there wasn’t a job ready for it. But now we have to go into all of those routines and optimize them so we can get even more done using that Cell processor. It really feels that sometimes it’s this bottomless pit of processing power; you find the right kind of job for it and it can just churn through those things so fast, which really helps with a lot of our rendering and post-processing effects.”
“So yes, we’re getting comfortable. No, we’re not itching for new hardware. I would love to keep working on the PlayStation [3] for 5 or 6 more years…I think there’s still a lot to get out of it. We’re not really feeling limited by the hardware; it’s more about the hours of the day and how quickly we want to get the next game out.”