Crysis 2 Devs Talk 360, PS3 Limitations

Digital Foundry have put up a huge interview with Crytek, the developers behind first person suit-em-up Crysis 2.  It’s a great read (as with all DF’s stuff) and well worth digesting over a nice cup of tea.

For the attention span deficient though, sites have cherry picking quotes all weekend- and rightly so, there’s some juicy little soundbytes in there that highlight some of the difficulties developers have with the current generation of consoles.

[drop]”GPU side, when programmed properly, they are fairly similar,” say the developers when asked about PS3 and Xbox 360. “We just have to be conscious of the clear handicap on PS3 RSX in terms of vertex processing, but other than that, on fragment processing side they are relatively similar.”

“Both have their strengths but such differences become irrelevant in the long run, especially when compared to PC platforms,” says principal graphics engineer Tiago Sousa.

“My finger-pointing at Microsoft/Sony would really be on the memory side,” he said. “It’s way too low, and the biggest crippling factor from a visual perspective. I would really like to see next-gen console platforms with a minimum of 8GB.”

There’s lots in there, of particular interest to anyone keen on how developers squeeze the best out of what are now relatively underpowered consoles in respect to PC tech.

Interestingly, neither the PS3 nor 360 version runs at ‘true 720p’.

“The 1152 x 720 resolution on 360 simply allows you to maximize eDRAM usage on a deferred lighting engine without having to resort to tiled rendering,” said Sousa.

“On the PS3, due to the extremely limited system memory we resorted to downloading memory into video memory. We bumped into severe video memory limitations, so it was a good compromise to save a big chunk of video memory for other usages.”

“I think we already tapped a large part of the consoles’ resources and hardware potential. But there is still quite some potential to push it further.”