Is the PS3's Cell chip really that much more powerful than the 360? Factor 5 President Julian Eggebrecht believes so; it's just a matter of optimizing for the PS3, he says. And while he thinks the Cell is limitless, he had some interesting observations about the limits of Epic's Unreal Engine, which he compared to the engine they're using in Lair.


In an interview with Dean Takahashi of the San Jose Mercury News, Julian Eggebrecht, president of game developer Factor 5 (which in recent years made a name for itself with Star Wars titles on the GameCube), shared some insight into PS3 development, how Lair got started, and perhaps most interestingly how he thinks the PS3 stacks up against the 360.


When asked about when his team figured out what the PS3 was capable of, he answered, "Will we ever? (laughs). The baseline isn't hard to figure out. Yes, it's a harder ramp. Everybody acknowledges that compared to the 360 and the Wii. It's not all that bad. It's not like the PS2 ramp was at the very beginning. The interesting question becomes 'oh boy, we could go on forever optimizing for the PlayStation 3.' The PS3 has more of the situation where you could go another six months easily and forever. You can get so much more power. RSX is a known quantity. But Cell is pretty limitless at this point."


Eggebrecht also believes that ports from PS3 to 360 will become more commonplace even though the 360 enjoys an install base advantage at the moment. For Eggebrecht, it's a matter of the system architecture of each console. "You'll have a hard time if you port without having a PS3 game in mind when you created the 360 version. That is where a lot of complaints are coming from. They created the 360 engine with a unified memory architecture in mind, with the embedded frame buffer with its advantages and disadvantages, and not thinking too much in early stages about multicore. If you try to get that over to the PS3, you're in for a bad surprise," he said.


He continued, "The PS3 is all about streamlining about the two different memory pools. They are separate. You don't have to do tiling because you don't have an embedded frame buffer. All of these advantages of the PS3 turn into disadvantages if you don't start making your game on the PS3. Hence the griping. If you create first on the PS3, it is pretty easy to port it to the 360. A lot of companies coming on board now will probably start on the PS3 and move to the 360. The lucky thing for us is we didn't have to think about the 360 at all."


Eggebrecht also shared some comments on what he believes are limitations for Epic's ubiquitous Unreal Engine 3: "In Gears of War there is no way you could actually go above the city and then basically go seamlessly from air to ground. Unreal Engine in the end just provides for corridor and corridor being more a metaphor here in terms of design. Our engine is always designed in a huge world bubble and that can be 32 kilometers by 32 kilometers. You can go anywhere at extreme speeds. Unreal Engine is dependent on the fact that you go relatively slowly through your world. With us, you can go through the world fast or slowly. If you are in night mode, or you are on the ground, you get all of the detail that Unreal Engine provides. But there is no way you can get the macro."


By contrast, Eggebrecht explained that Lair will be the first game to give the player the 20,000-foot view and the one meter level view with the same amount of detail. Not being a launch title has its advantages, he said. "Lair is also the only game which does all of its light in real time, and the atmospheric calculations. That gives us the day and nights cycle, the fluid dynamic simulations in the water. That wouldn't have been possible half a year ago," Eggebrecht remarked. "We needed more time for that. You need the SPUs for that. Extensive streaming. Ted Price mentioned in an interview that Ratchet is now the first one where they start to stream. I can understand why they didn't do it for Resistance. With Lair, you have to do it or you cannot manage the detail level and the expectations for the detail level and at the same time move around this world."

ITANI via biz.gamedaily.com »