Haze Developer Dave Zoak On: PS3 Processing Power  

Here is the entire interview, but I will give you the gist of what he says. The title of the interview is "Dave Doak Attacks the FPS." The crux of his argument for the PS3 is this: (Quotes in green).

    "Its strengths are obviously that is has a lot of processing power. Its weaknesses are that its processing power is locked away at the moment. But everyone's going to hit that wall across all platforms at first."

    I see this as extremely positive. Whie the PS3's power may be locked away, the fact is that the power is there. In my opinion, it is better for power to be there and currently unreachable than for there to be no room for growth as may have been true had Sony gone the "easy to develop for" route. Dave Doak expounds on this:

    "[A]s people continue to make bigger and faster games, this will change as the technology isn't scaleable anymore because everything's going to be multi-core. It's not going to be two or four processors; it's going to be 64. And everybody is going to have to learn to make software for that and that's the big challenge that everyone faces."

    This seems to confirm that he (and hopefully other developers) have room to spare when programming for the PS3. Yes, the PS3 is basically on-par with other platforms graphically now, which seems to fly directly in the face of the reasoning that Sony gives for spending this much on a console. In addition, one does not want to put too much stock in developer's promises for future console potential.

    But when individuals  try to construe "locked away" power in the PS3 as negative, well that's just irresponsible and silly. Wait until the REAL games come out to judge - the games Sony is touting for this winter and next spring. Then the debates may begin on whether this console is worth the dough. Yeah, it's a ten-year console supposedly, but a year and a half to two years is a good starting point to judge the console's potential.

    This is not to say that early adopters don't have a point in being mildly upset in Sony's losing exclusives and in games pushed back to never. But when judging the console's worth, these early months are not the best benchmarks for judgement.

    Well, this ran on a little long. Sorry. Thanks for reading.

Interesting read. The only thing I'm going to disagree with is where you imply that an easier to develop for system may have had less room to grow. People seem to equate more advanced and more powerful hardware with difficult to use, and at the same time the reverse is then implied, anything easy to work with is obviously less powerful (or at an extreme "last gen"). No developer (at least none that I've ever met) enjoys working with a complicated and hard to use API. This is something I think microsoft excels at, because of their ties in software development for the PC, and Nintendo has done well, by sticking with the same development environment as the gamecube. It's nice to hear that the PS3 has tons of power under the hood, but if the developers have to painstakingly drag it out of the system, then its almost worse than not having it at all. In my opinion, Sony should have been able to provide that raw power while making it less of a chore to use. They didn't, and that doesn't make me feel very positive about the company.

Just as a side note, you don't necessarily need greater processing power in order to produce graphically advanced games.

As we have seen from every system which has been supported after the next generation begins (NES, SNES, Playstation) and from handheld systems which are "obsolete" when they're released (Gameboy, GBA, Nintendo DS) you can often produce the apearance of a graphical effects at a lower performance cost then actually producing the graphical effect; essentially, you find a trick.

Generally speaking, the conditions needed to produce these kinds of tricks are a solid understanding of the graphical effect you are trying to emulate, a solid understanding of the system you're trying to emulate the effect on, and the motivation to emulate the effect on this system. The Wii benefits from this because most of the effects you would try to emulate on the Wii would be well known effects that are being produced on the PS3/XBox 360, the Wii is easy to understand and developers should be able to obtain reliable performance from it, and the Wii having lower graphical capabilities will lead developers to try to stand out graphically.

Its ubisoft, power will always be beyond their reach. same can't be said about the likes of SE Konami Factor5 Insomniacs NoughtyDog, they are already getting enough power out of PS3 that no other console can match.

Show a little respect ... Free Radical is (essentially) many of the best developers from Rare and is still a very talented developer.

 You get it completly backwards. A plattform that's make it difficult to develop for isr first of all one thing: expensive for the development companies.

No sane devewloper I know enjoys working on a difficult plattforms, because the work simply never stops. There are ALWAYS possible changes in the structure of your program or possible features that could be implemented if they don't have to fight unstructered APIs or try to release some parts of a "locked" power. And these ideas could improve the game much more than 5% more power.

There are simply two possibilities: Either he is a masochist, or he is on an advertisment campaign for the PS-3. 

 Not untill they make somethinn great.

 Thet surely as the grass is green are not one of the top game devs.

How about TimeSplitters 2 and TimeSplitters 3?

You know, 2 of the best FPS released in the last generation?

I would definately say it is worth the dough, but I just dont have it. Nor do many people.

Yea, FreeRadical may be small but they are pretty elite. TimeSplitters2 was pretty sweet, I mean a map maker for multiplayer levels... in a console game?! The only GC game I play more often is Melee.