In an interview with Official PlayStation Magazine UK, Mark Cerny, the PS4's lead system architect, has discussed implementing an x86 processor and his surprise at developers most requested feature – unified memory.
Cerny begins by noting that there were those in Sony who believed x86, which has been around for over 30 years, could still not be used in a games console.
"The first real interaction that we had with the game teams was talking to first-party about the x86 and explaining why we felt that finally it was useable in a console. We made 15 separate presentations. We went from morning to mid-afternoon going through how we felt the time had come.
"We knew we needed to show that our dedication and our concern was just as high as the game teams’. The presentation we did was so long that one of the teams was stranded on the tarmac for five hours, and they still arrived before we finished going through all the materials we prepared."
The lead designer of launch title Knack added that the changes made in the creation of the PS4 has made it much easier for developers to take advantage of the system's assets and he echoed previous comments he's made about developers getting more out of the console in a few years.
"We have 140 titles in development right now, [because] it’s very easy to make games for the system. [In that respect] things are pretty much how they were in the PS1 days. Then over the next few years, as programmers get the chance to dig deeper, [you’ll see] improvements in graphics and simulation as PS4’s secrets are unlocked. That will happen because we did extensive customisation of the GPU in PS4."
Cerny notes that Sony talked extensively to developers when creating the PS4 and he was surprised by the fact that the number one requested feature was a unified memory system.
"The most surprising feedback I got was [that they wanted] unified memory. I had not expected that to be the number one request from developers – [even] PS2 didn’t have unified memory, if you go back that far."
He added that including this feature in developers' toolset has greatly enhanced their freedom when creating games for the PS4.
"It’s speed of development, and it’s flexibility. The way it works on PS3 is that the graphical assets go into one pool of memory and your programmatic assets tend to go in another. The memory is divided equally, and your graphics assets might not be half of what you have. So generally, when you’re using memory that isn’t unified like that, you end up having to do a lot of shuffling between the pools to make your game work."
The PS4 is set to be released on November 15th in North America, November 29th in Europe, and February 2014 in Japan where gamers will get a free copy of Knack as compensation for the delayed launch.
