Shocking affirmation by Naughty dog

[Elandyll]

That Uncharted taps a mere 30-40% of he system's potential

http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/ne...s-power/?biz=1

PS3 Games Using Only 30% of System's Power?

According to the folks at Naughty Dog, it's estimated that Uncharted only taps about 30 to 40 percent of the PS3's total power. If true, that's mighty impressive…
by James Brightman on Tuesday, August 05, 2008

For the last year or so, games on Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 have looked fairly comparable in terms of graphics. Sony and certain developers would argue that the PS3 is definitely a far more powerful machine than the 360, capable of producing visuals that easily outpace those generated on the 360, but others would make the case for the 360 ' s development environment.

Naughty Dog, the studio behind one of the PS3's best looking titles to date, Uncharted, is obviously in the former camp. What's interesting, however, is that Naughty Dog believes it's only begun to scratch the surface of what the PS3 is truly capable of. Speaking to “semi-official” Sony blog Three Speech, Richard Lemarchand, Co-Lead Game Designer at Naughty Dog, commented: ”… part of the skill of developing for the PlayStation 3 is getting the GPU to farm jobs out to the six SPUs - seeing which SPUs are idling and can take up some of the slack in a frame-to-frame kind of way. That's why we think we're probably only using 30 or 40 per cent of the power of the PS3 right now, and there's this great, untapped potential. All third-party developers can get the Edge libraries for free and 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. “

If games like Uncharted look stunningly good at 30 to 40 percent, imagine how beautiful they'll appear as developers come closer to using 100 percent of the PS3's power.

In other parts of the interview, Lemarchand talks about Uncharted's retro-fitted support of the new PS3 trophy system and he also reveals that “we're quite a way into our next production cycle now,” but it's unclear if that next project is a sequel to Uncharted since the game's not yet been announced.

[ryoohki]

Meh at 30% of power by a developper, you always ear stories and most of the time those extra % aren't graphics but other little things. That goes for every system exclusive developper..

[KingBing]

This is old news!! This was brought up even when heavenly sword was released last august!!

[Simplayer]

Originally Posted by ryoohki

Meh at 30% of power by a developper, you always ear stories and most of the time those extra % aren't graphics but other little things. That goes for every system exclusive developper..

What would the extra 60-70% be devoted to then?

[DaMexiRican]

Wasn't the first Resistance only using around 20%?

[dpomp]

where's AliceT??

[Elandyll]

It might be tacky to hear that and given that we still have to see a game that is a true "OMFG display of power" (with a partial display between Uncharted and MGS4), but coming from the guys who made Uncharted, I thought it was quite the claim...

[DeathByAsh'aman]

Originally Posted by ryoohki

Meh at 30% of power by a developper, you always ear stories and most of the time those extra % aren't graphics but other little things. That goes for every system exclusive developper..

For 60-70% those are some damn big little things. I know the graphics wont take up the rest of the power but it goes to show that there is definately room to grow in that department.

[Ascended_Saiyan]

Originally Posted by DeathByAsh'aman

For 60-70% those are some damn big little things. I know the graphics wont take up the rest of the power but it goes to show that there is definately room to grow in that department.

Graphics COULD take up the rest of the power. That's the beauty of an extremely flexible platform. They could decide to keep the level of physics at an "Uncharted" level and use the rest for graphics improvements. Or, they could mix and match as they see fit.

[PS3-Playb3yond]

This is already posted in the Uncharted thread.

[Septimus Prime]

Of course, since we don't even know what 100% is right now, there's no real way for us to gauge how much of it we've already tapped.

[Ascended_Saiyan]

Actually, there IS a way to track this. All you do is measure the usage between the CPU and the GPU (like in the CPU "task manager" on PCs). It's that simple.

[AliceT]

Originally Posted by dpompeo

where's AliceT??

right here. I love hearing things like this , as far as a percentage goes. Theres no way to know what the percentage is in real life. They can guess, but to say it only uses 30% is only a guess on his part. People said the same thing about EVERY other system out there. Ive never seen proof of it.

[Blu-Generation]

Originally Posted by AliceT

right here. I love hearing things like this , as far as a percentage goes. Theres no way to know what the percentage is in real life. They can guess, but to say it only uses 30% is only a guess on his part. People said the same thing about EVERY other system out there. Ive never seen proof of it.

Lacking of proof doesn't always mean it isn't true. Not that I'm trying to back this whole 30 percent deal up, I'm not. I don't really mind how many percentage they think they are using.

But it's just that in most cases, the absense of evidence isn't always evidence.
So just cause you don't have any proof, it does not mean much.

[AliceT]

Originally Posted by Blu-Generation

Lacking of proof doesn't always mean it isn't true. Not that I'm trying to back this whole 30 percent deal up, I'm not. I don't really mind how many percentage they think they are using.

But it's just that in most cases, the absense of evidence isn't always evidence.
So just cause you don't have any proof, it does not mean much.

True, but the point is, people on the ps2 have said X game is only using 20% blah blah. Well, then wheres the game that looks AMAZINGLY BETTER and is using close to 100%? ALso, why doesnt anyone call out naughty dog and say, why did you only do 30% of the work then and release a game that was sub par if you truly think you only got 30% out of it? Thats kind of like going to your boss and saying " Yeah i finished it, but you only got 30% of the work out of me that you could have"

[air_max]

if a game uses 100% of the system, wouldn't it be unable to perform any other functions? (i.e. stay logged into playstation network, in game XMB, etc. etc.)

[Cyorg]

Originally Posted by AliceT

True, but the point is, people on the ps2 have said X game is only using 20% blah blah. Well, then wheres the game that looks AMAZINGLY BETTER and is using close to 100%? ALso, why doesnt anyone call out naughty dog and say, why did you only do 30% of the work then and release a game that was sub par if you truly think you only got 30% out of it? Thats kind of like going to your boss and saying " Yeah i finished it, but you only got 30% of the work out of me that you could have"

When he originally made the 30-40% claim a few months ago, he said that they only used that much power because they completely underestimated the PS3. Now that they have a better idea of how to use it, and what they can effectively put into it, Uncharted 2 should be much better. But I don't think that they'll have such a huge improvement in the graphics department. We'll probably see things like better AI, physics, and more action on screen, with a slight graphical improvement.

[saprano]

The ps2 had a tool called the Performance Analyzer, it was used to tell you how much power your getting out of the ps2 http://research.scea.com/research/pd...er_18Mar03.pdf

http://www.technology.scee.net/files...rHaveWeGot.pdf

i dont if sony is making something like this for the ps3.

[bluearth]

Originally Posted by ryoohki

Meh at 30% of power by a developper, you always ear stories and most of the time those extra % aren't graphics but other little things. That goes for every system exclusive developper..

The guys who make Gears of war exlusively for the 360 said they pushed the 360 to 90% with Gears 1

So I don't think you can say its the same for every console

[Blu-Generation]

Originally Posted by AliceT

True, but the point is, people on the ps2 have said X game is only using 20% blah blah. Well, then wheres the game that looks AMAZINGLY BETTER and is using close to 100%? ALso, why doesnt anyone call out naughty dog and say, why did you only do 30% of the work then and release a game that was sub par if you truly think you only got 30% out of it? Thats kind of like going to your boss and saying " Yeah i finished it, but you only got 30% of the work out of me that you could have"

If it's a new IP, they can get away with it.

They gotta test the market first. Why put so much money into a new title? Why not just go 30-40-50 percent and release it to save time and money. Now if the first game is a hit, and they release a second one, it's still only 50 percent or so, and graphic are not much improvement over the first game. What's up? Then we can question.

But if the first game is a flop, then the 30 percent was a good try. So for any new IP, they can get away with not pushing the limit. It's hard for anyone to call a game half-bake when the franchise was never baked to begin with you know. They always gotta play around and see how things work first.

As for PS2 game, I'm not sure what percentage FF12 uses, but I played it on my 60GB PS3 yesterday, and it looked amazing. Clearly surpassing FF10 that came before it.