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Naughty Dog: PS3 Running at Only 30-40%

Kris Graft's picture

By Kris Graft

August 5, 2008

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"[Third-party developers] are going to be able to use Edge in their own ways, to get more and more and more out of the PS3 over the years."

The PlayStation 3 has churned out some great-looking games, but Naughty Dog co-lead designer Richard Lemarchand says Sony's Edge toolset will unlock the true potential of the Cell processor.

"There’s a set of tools called Edge that were developed on the Naughty Dog premises, actually, by a group of very, very senior games programmer, some from Naughty Dog and some from elsewhere," Lemarchand told ThreeSpeech.

"...That’s why we think we’re probably only using 30 or 40 percent of the power of the PS3 right now, and there’s this great, untapped potential."

Lemarchand called the tools "low-level libraries" and said they are available for free to third-party developers. Naughty Dog is the developer of the sharp-looking Uncharted: Drake's fortune, and is a Sony first-party studio.

Sony Computer Entertainment announced the Edge toolset in early 2007, which was developed in a partnership between WWS Europe Advanced Technology Group, WWS America ICE team and WWS America Tools and Technology group.

"Rather than overarching engine, these teams have chosen to create specialized systems that demonstrate best practices of SPU and RSX utilization," Sony said at the time.

The Cell is made up of a PowerPC core, supplemented by eight SPEs (Synergistic Processing Units).

This architecture has been described by developers as "exotic," and more difficult to develop for than more traditional hardware.

But Edge tools could make the development process considerably easier for developers, according to Lemarchand. "[Third-party developers] are going to be able to use them in their own ways, to get more and more and more out of the PS3 over the years."

Bleak Corner's picture
On August 6th Bleak Corner said:

Actually, we are not "far enough in the cycle" as it has been made clear on several occasions that the one for current generation consoles is going to be longer. I remember similar optimizing tools for both the Playstation 1 and 2 and games drastically improved when people started using them. If these libraries will become available for all third party developers, we'll eventually see what happens, won't we? I was really hoping this board would be free from the pathetic "discussion" aka mud throwing that 360 and PS3 owners seem to constantly do - I guess it's not. They're both great systems - however, the PS3 does have more potential on paper. Let's see whether it will be used.

coop's picture
On August 6th coop said:

Yeah, I wish the fanboys would stick to the IGN (etc) boards, but I guess thats asking too much. I'm a PS3 guy, but I would readily admit that MS provides better tools for development. I use Visual Studio every day in the real word and its fantastic, blows everything else away. So I know MS is capable of delivering quality tools.

Also, as both companies have been saying, neither one plans on releasing a new system any time soon, its going to be 5-7 years. So any tools that help will definitely be appreciated, as we've got a long way to go.

rydamgw's picture
On August 6th rydamgw said:

So wut will u say if they turn out to be correct and these tools start to bring about games that the 360 cant handle or even come close to wut will u xbots do prolly just shrug it off like you all did the rrod and still say that u have a good system now thats a joke

grognard66's picture
On August 6th grognard66 said:

Yeah, this second party developer is just pandering to this second party blog (threespeech) audience. You can always develop a tool that shows you are theoretically tapping only a certain percentage of a particular processing application, but in the real world that's only one aspect of the hardware and it's the rest that's holding you back (i.e. RAM) from making any appreciable improvements to future games on the system.
We're far enough into the cycle to know what all these consoles are capable of and we'll only see incremental improvements from particularly savy developers, but nothing significant.
This is just more of Sony's PR effort to overcome the stigma of Sony's poor SDK's and notoriously shabby technical support - kind of like the pathetic segment on their E3 presentation where they had to strong arm developers to say nice things about working on the console.

coop's picture
On August 6th coop said:

Kim youre such a troll that no one reads your crap because it makes zero sense, so quit bothering or at least keep it short so i can scroll past it easier.

Conda, thats funny. I worked for a company that did the India outsourcing thing, swear to god I got a guy put on my team that had a degree in the "theory of programming" but had never actually used a computer.

Kim_Naroz's picture
On August 6th Kim_Naroz said:

This is the exact same statement made by Sega and their 1st party developers with the Sega Saturn, which also used a parallel processing environment similar to the Playstation 3.

The problem is, these "potential" improvements were never seen. The "untapped resources" were never tapped into.

The big jump in quality that took place between Virtua Fighter 1 and Virtua Fighter 2 on the Saturn was primarily because games like VF1 and Daytona USA looked so incredibly bad due to the fact that the Saturn was launched early.

Playstation 3 launched late, so the first generation of PS3 games actually had plenty of time being programmed with final versions of the development kits. This is why we haven't seen much of an improvement between first generation and third generation PS3 games.

Xbox 360 has actually seen a big jump in software quality each generation for several reasons. First, because the Xbox 360 launched early and the developers had access to only beta versions of development kits that allowed them to use only one-sixth of the Xbox 360 CPU power (since only one in six of the CPU Threads was available in those beta development kits).

Second, because the second generation of Xbox 360 games saw what could happen with the Unreal engine that runs so smoothly on the Xbox 360.

Third, because the newest generation with Gears of War 2 sees what happens when the Xbox 360 is programmed with an optimized Unreal Engine. This is the reason why Gears of War 2 on the Xbox 360 literally has graphics that are better than the PC version of Gears of War running on a high-end PC graphics card.

conda's picture
On August 6th conda said:

Maybe the Indian's will conquer the (excotic) PS3.