God of War: Chains of Olympus developer Ready at Dawn has said that PlayStation 4 is more powerful than most home computers.
Speaking to Game Informer, the studio’s art and tech director, Garrett Foster, added his voice to the chorus of developers singing praise for Sony’s next-generation console, saying it’s the most powerful piece of kit on the market.
“The power speaks [for] itself. It’s more powerful than most computers on the planet, and it is the most powerful console on the planet. With that, they allow us bare-to-the-metal access [hardware free of pre-loaded software]. We can do whatever we want to. Even the head of the ATI a couple months ago came out and said graphics are getting held back by a software layer that PC developers just can’t take advantage of. What we’re able to do is take it to a new level where we can literally take advantage of every cycle and try to make it as best it can be.”
Ready at Dawn artist Nathan Phail-Liff went on to highlight the advantages that PS4 brings in comparison to its predecessor, which featured notoriously tricky architecture.
“From an art standpoint, with every generational shift you can do more of everything. You can nickel and dime – ‘Oh we have this many more polygons and significant more textures.’ There’s this standard order of magnitude growth on the whole detail of level. But some of the standout things for us, going from the PS3 generation to the PS4, are the shading and internal models. That’s a huge thing.
“On PS3 there’s a lot more approximations of how objects look and respond to light,” he continued. “With the PS4 we can implement a much more reality-based, advanced shading model. So metals aren’t just shiny, they actually look like the physical samples in the real world. So that’s something that, for getting polygon and texture budgets just makes everything from lightning to physical objects really shine.”
Ready at Dawn is currently working on its first PS4 title, the ambitious-looking The Order 1886. The title will be exclusive to Sony’s new console and is scheduled to ship in 2014.