Killzone: Shadow Fall may be drawing its fair share of criticism for lacking innovation, but there’s no denying that the title is already shaping up to be a visual masterpiece. That’s mostly due to the brute power of the PlayStation 4, which is perfectly "balanced” according to Dutch developer Guerrilla Games.
"The fact that the best pieces of hardware are also devised from, or optimised versions of, the stuff we find in PCs doesn't make it any less of a console," said the studio’s technical director Michiel Van Der Leeuw in an interview with EDGE magazine [via VideoGamer]. "A PC is a number of parts that also [have] bridges in-between, where there are inefficiencies that may [come in if they're not] exactly the right match."
However, Sony's supposedly avoided such issues with the PS4. "We've got the right amount of memory, video card; everything's balanced out,” he continued. “It was a very conscious effort to make sure that – with the speed of the memory, the amount of compute units, the speed of the hard drive – there would not be any bottlenecks.”
While performance limitations are typically discovered several years after a new piece of hardware’s release, Van Der Leeuw added that the first-party studio has already spent more than a year trying to find a disadvantage to the PS4’s design. "I think it was for more than a year that we knew the main ingredients and there was just discussion after discussion trying to find a bottleneck,” he said. “Take a look at this design; try to find the bottleneck."
Guerrilla Games recently revealed that it's already completed development on a rough version of Killzone: Shadow Fall’s single player campaign, with the developer now applying hearty dollops of polish ahead of the title’s release later this year. Are you looking forward to the next generation sequel? Let us know in the comments section below.
[source videogamer.com]
Comments 5
"the speed of the hard drive"
So no 12GB flash memory then, only HDD, or does "hard drive" cover both of those in the industry now?
@rjejr It's hard to tell. It makes me wonder if there's an SSD in there, though. Probably too expensive, though.
If they are talking hard drive speed, then they have to be talking solid state. There is no other way.
What I hope they do (and do with my home PC) is have a small (to keep costs down) solid state disk, which runs the operating system, and could also be used as effectively a cache for any games/app that are running. Then have a second huge traditional hard disk for storage.
Solid state have come down a lot in price as long as you are looking at the smaller ones. It would still be a significant hardware cost though.
Personally I hope they do it.
Looking at the screenshots again. It really is pretty!
I'd assume that it's just a 7200 RPM drive, based on the fact that they stated it will be a "very large" hard drive. It would be interesting if they implemented a hybrid drive. They could have system specific items install on the flash memory to speed up load times and menus, while game data is saved on the actual platters of the hard drive. Also, this solution would be cost effective assuming that Sony is sticking with the 2.5" laptop hard drives.
I'm willing to bet they won't include a full SSD drive in the standard model if they are promising "very large" drives lol.
A 500gb SSD would probably cost 3x as much as the rest of the internal components! If anything, I wonder if we'll see a hybrid drive or maybe even a bunch of flash storage instead of spinning media. Either way, it's good to know they aren't getting held up in the dev process due to hardware
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