Project CARS Dev: PS4 Single Core Speed Slower Than High-End PC, Splitting Renderer Across Threads Challenging

In our on going coverage of Project CARS, GamingBolt recently had a chance to speak to Slightly Mad Studios, developer behind the stunning racer which was recently announced to be releasing on the PS4 and Xbox One in late 2014. A lot has changed for the studio since that announcement, with the visuals of the game being compared to the likes of Forza Motorsport 5 and Drive Club. Creative Director Andy Tudor has his own thoughts on what to do with all that power though, specifically with the PS4.

On being asked if there was a challenge in development due to different CPU threads and GPU compute units in the PS4, Tudor stated that, “It’s been challenging splitting the renderer further across threads in an even more fine-grained manner – even splitting already-small tasks into 2-3ms chunks. The single-core speed is quite slow compared to a high-end PC though so splitting across cores is essential.

“The bottlenecks are mainly in command list building – we now have this split-up of up to four cores in parallel. There are still some bottlenecks to work out with memory flushing to garlic, even after changing to LCUE, the memory copying is still significant.”

As for the console’s other features, such as the Share button, Tudor confirmed that the studio has plans for the same. “As you’ll have seen from our YouTube presence, the gameplay videos and trailers people have been making so far are getting millions of views so being able to share or stream your proudest moments direct from the game either via Twitch or Upload Studio are pretty engaging features.”

Project CARS will arrive for PC, SteamOS, Wii U, Xbox One and PS4 in Q3/Q4 2014.