News > Factor 5 Loves the PS3
April 16, 2007
In a recent interview, Factor 5 president, Julian Eggebrecht raved about the power of the PS3 while discussing next gen game development. Basically, his message was that the PS3 has potential well beyond what people may think, and that it would benefit developers to begin their projects on that platform. Here are a few snippets from the interview:
Q: How soon did you figure out what the PlayStation 3 could do?
A: Will we ever? (laughs). The baseline isn’t hard to figure out. Yes, it’s a harder ramp. ...The interesting question becomes “oh boy, we could go on forever optimizing for the PlayStation 3.” The PS 3 has more of the situation where you could go another six months easily and forever. You can get so much more power. RSX is a known quantity. But Cell is pretty limitless at this point.Q: How do you look back at this point on the differences between the PS 3 and the Xbox 360?
A: You’ll have a hard time if you port without having a PS 3 game in mind when you created the 360 version. That is where a lot of complaints are coming from. They created the 360 engine with a unified memory architecture in mind, with the embedded frame buffer with its advantages and disadvantages, and not thinking too much in early stages about multicore. If you try to get that over to the PS 3, you’re in for a bad surprise. The PS 3 is all about streamlining about the two different memory pools. They are separate. You don’t have to do tiling because you don’t have an embedded frame buffer. All of these advantages of the PS 3 turn into disadvantages if you don’t start making your game on the PS 3. Hence the griping. If you create first on the PS 3, it is pretty easy to port it to the 360. A lot of companies coming on board now will probably start on the PS 3 and move to the 360. The lucky thing for us is we didn’t have to think about the 360 at all.Q: Do you note some things that are good about Lair that we haven’t seen in a PS 3 title yet? Launch titles always make some compromises.
A: Yes. Lair basically is the only game out there which gives you a 20,000 feet view as well as the one meter level view at pretty much the same detail level. Lair is also the only game which does all of its light in real time, and the atmospheric calculations. That gives us the day and nights cycle, the fluid dynamic simulations in the water. That wouldn’t have been possible half a year ago. We needed more time for that. You need the SPUs for that. Extensive streaming...
Well, when the developers of games start telling us which console is the powerhouse in the console race, we may as well believe them. After all, they have the most intimate relationship with the hardware, and know it the best. As for the impact on gamers, maybe other studios will heed Eggebrecht's words and find an easier way to deliver the best quality games to all platforms.
-Eddie R Inzauto
