Developing for the PlayStation 4, especially compared to the Xbox One, has been a relatively painless process for most developers. Whether it’s the x86 architecture or the unified memory, Sony’s next gen console has been praised by both indie devs and big name publishers. Speaking to GamingBolt, founder, president and CTO of Terathon Software Eric Lengyel talked about how easy it was to port the C4 Engine from the PS3 to the PS4.
More importantly, Lengyel outlined how it bodes for development on the platform and how easy it is to optimize on the PS4 compared to the PC.
“There are three main reasons why porting to the PS4 went smoothly for us. First, we were able to use all of our SIMD-optimized PC code without modification because the PS4 is based on x86 processors. Second, many of the APIs used by non-graphics components of the engine (like low-level threading, audio, and networking) are very similar between the PS3 and PS4, so we didn’t have to do much work to get them running.
“Finally, and possibly most importantly, Sony has provided an excellent integration with Visual Studio that makes debugging on the PS4 a pleasant experience.
“It’s always going to be easier to optimize for a console because the exact hardware is known. On the PC, we have to consider a huge range of CPU and GPU capabilities, and that often makes straightforward optimizations impractical.”
As for the advantages that the 8 GB GDDR5 RAM offers when used with the C4 Engine, Lengyel states that, “The fast memory will allow larger textures to be used, and this will enable higher detail on objects when they are close to the camera. Compute shaders are also able to stream data into the GPU faster, and this allows more computation to be done for a large variety of tasks.”
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