Developers are unlikely to find themselves running out of memory this generation thanks to the PS4 and Xbox One’s meaty 8GB RAM, reckons former Naughty Dog developer and Filmic Worlds founder, John Hable.
Speaking with GamingBolt, Hable suggests that consoles are packing more than enough technical muscle in the hood this cycle to ensure they are not outdated in a few years time.
“In general, I would not worry about the consoles becoming outdated. Remember, the PS3 and Xbox 360 have only 512MB of RAM, but the PC versions of the same games usually require 2GB or more. On consoles you have more control over memory allocations. The 8GB of RAM in both the Xbox One and PS4 should be plenty for the remainder of this console generation," he said.
Hable worked on Uncharted 2: Among Thieves’ jaw-dropping HDR lighting effects, one of the many visuals highlights that would lead the action-adventure title to become one of PS3’s best-looking games. Even today, six years on, it still looks fantastic and it’s a real testament to the efforts of Hable and his co-workers at Naughty Dog.
The developer went on to add his thoughts on the future of lighting techniques:
“For me, my major complaint these days with games is light leaking. It is too expensive to have a shadow on every light that you make in a game so you have this effect where light seems to bleed through objects. As an example, you might see a character with a bright light behind him or her. Then you will see these bright lights on the creases of his or her clothes which should not be there. That is light leaking and it drives me crazy. You also see it a lot on muzzle flashes. That is the next thing that I would like to see improved.
“Global Illumination still needs some work too. In many games with Global Illumination I still feel like objects lack good contact shadows in ambient light. And the falloff often does not look natural to me. Good baked lighting in a video game is still not a solved problem.”