In a GameInformer interview, Destiny's technical director Chris Butcher has said that the PS3 and Xbox 360 still have "a lot of headroom" for Bungie but added that they're close to using "every ounce of juice" on the last-gen systems.
"The current generation of consoles, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, they have a lot of headroom still for us. We have the most optimized game engine we've ever produced for these consoles. We're getting at the point now where we are wringing pretty much every ounce of juice out of the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3."
Explaining what this means he practice Butcher added:
"We're running higher character counts and higher player counts than we thought would even be possible on these things because we're using every ounce of the CPUs and the SPUs and we're offloading stuff to the graphics processor.
"You're basically eating the whole buffalo at this point in the current generation. And that's been our target right from the start is to make sure that we can provide that game experience that is consistent for everybody."
Also in the interview, Butcher spoke at length about Destiny's online capabilities and what Bungie has learned from MMOs. Destiny has a release date of September 9th for PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.