In this era of next gen consoles, we’re seeing the emergence of engine developers at a much faster rate than before, compared to the days where Unreal Engine and CryEngine would hog the headlines. Allegorithmic’s Substance Engine which is used to drastically reduce the file size and provides unique visual effects by using dynamic effects in real time, is another example, and supports just about every platform available including the PS4 and Xbox One.
Interestingly while demonstrating texture generation speed, DXT compressed, using Substance Engine, for one CPU, it was found that the PlayStation 4 is able to generate 14MB/s of textures compared to 12MB/s for the Xbox One. Obviously, the Intel Core i7 trounces both of them rather easily at 26 MB/s. Check out the table above.
[Note: DXT is DirectX Texture Compression which can be useful for images without drastic color changes but is somewhat harder and lossy than Zlib compression]
As mentioned above, some of the benefits of Substance include reducing file size which makes the engine useful for the likes of PlayGo which is one of the pivotal features of the PlayStation 4. Substance can easily integrate with several industry standard engines like UDK, Unity Maya and others. It will be interesting to see whether developers will be using this tool to make better games.