Jonathan Blow, the creator behind Braid and The Witness, has suggested the PlayStation 4 is easier to develop games for than PC, thanks to its increased RAM.
Speaking with EDGE, Blow championed the console’s speed and made it clear Sony’s new machine is packing some serious muscle under the hood.
“For The Witness we’re mostly interested in the base machine and how fast it is – the fact it has faster RAM than a PC, which really helps in shuttling graphics resources around, and since it’s not running a heavyweight operating system like Windows that gets in the way of your graphics,” said Blow.
“Rendering stuff through Windows has an impact on performance. Since a console is just about games, that doesn’t happen, and the equivalent game will run faster. And if you can target to specific hardware you can make it run faster, too.”
PS4’s ‘Share’ button in particular intrigued Blow, who said of the feature:
“In general, as a platform feature, it’s super interesting,” adding: “One thing that most game developers have become really aware of is that over the past couple of years on YouTube the whole livecast and commentary thing is really huge.”
“A lot of people are paying a lot of attention to it now and it’s interesting to see what happens if you base an entire console around it. That’s what’s crazy about PS4 – it has a chip that’s always recording to a maybe two-minute buffer. After something cool happens, it’s there in the buffer. That’s the sort of thing that’s really going to change the way something’s used.”
Blow’s next project, The Witness, is a launch-window exclusive for PS4. Sony’s new home console will be released in holiday 2013.