Geomerics are a third-party lighting technology provider to major gaming studios, and their tech has been featured in many high profile games like Battlefield 3.
We asked specific questions to Dr. Chris Doran, Founder & COO of the company, on the difference between PC and console tech in a yet to be published interview, and he had a lot of interesting things to say.
“Making games for the PS3/360 generation does bring challenges compared to modern PCs, though we have learnt a huge amount in terms of squeezing optimum performance out of those machines,” Dr. Doran revealed.
“You always get this on a console cycle. If you look at the games coming out at the end of the cycle, like Medal of Honor: Warfighter, I think people would say they far exceed what anyone thought possible at the start of the cycle. “Certainly, we had people telling us that real-time global illumination was not possible in this console cycle, until we showed that it could be done.”
He also said that the memory limitation on consoles are something of a bottleneck and even developers are looking forward to a time where they don’t have to deal with the 512MB RAM limitations on PS3 and Xbox 360.
“The one issue that we are stuck with, however, is memory. Every part of the game is fighting for memory resource and this inevitably leads to trade-offs,” he revealed.
“I think a lot of developers are looking forward to a time when they can develop big blockbuster games without the constraints of fitting it all into 512MB.”
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