You might know Arrowhead Studios from their much acclaimed action adventure game Magicka and now the team is currently working a PlayStation platform exclusive Helldivers. As expected the team is full of praise for the PlayStation 4. Johan Pilestedt who is the CEO and Game Director at Arrowhead studios shared his thoughts on the PS4’s GPU and memory, and how it has helped the development team to put in more visual effects and complex compute calculations into the game.
“Well, sure the GPU is nice but what’s the real charm is the memory speed and amount – having that overhead when making a game in 1080p really allows us to use the appropriate texture sizes. Since the game is going to run on all three platforms our goal has always been to scale things up for the PS4 and scale things down for the Vita, the PS4 has been a charm to work on – there have never been any problems with the performance,” he said to us.
He also revealed that being from a PC games development background, they are effectively utilizing all the cores of the PlayStation 4’s CPU.
“Since we use the Bitsquid engine, most of the threading is done in the engine and as such I wouldn’t say that the project really gains any creative freedom from the multi-core approach. It’s just a different way of approaching the technical side of things, we can dedicate a thread to do some performance intensive tasks (this is also true for the PS3) but since we come from the PC-development side of things we’re pretty much used to utilizing multi-core processors in an efficient way,” he revealed.
Helldivers will be out later this year for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3 and PS Vita.