Cort Stratton, a senior programmer on Sony’s ICE Team has revealed a few interesting tid-bits about the PlayStation 4’s graphics capabilities. First of all he revealed that the PlayStation 4 has no issues in supporting 16 X Anisotropic Filtering, a method by which in game textures look great even when viewed at an angle. But certain games like Thief use the less impressive Trilinear filtering which led some users to raises questions whether the PS4’s GPU is capable of supporting 16 X AF.
Cort stated that there are no hardware issues restricting 16 X AF that he is aware of. “No hardware/SDK issues that I’m aware of. Sounds like a question for the developer.”
We had earlier reported that how Cort’s new code for PS4 will make surface tiling/detiling ~10-100x faster on the CPU. He clarified that the code won’t necessarily improve run time performance but will help in faster offline asset baking and GPU capture tools. “Most likely results would be faster offline asset baking and GPU capture tools for devs. Unlikely to have much runtime impact,” he tweeted.
[Baking: When game assets are readied for packaging/shipping they need to be ‘baked’ in a particular format which can be readily used. GPU Capture Tools: Tools to judge the performance of the GPU in terms of frame rate, stuttering, frame rate drops etc.]
It’s interesting to note that PlayStation engineers are hard at work, trying to improve performance across the board, something that Microsoft is doing with their updates as well. At the end of the day, all these improvements will not only result into better games but games that perform well at a technical level as well.
