Developers “Wanted 1000 Times the Power of PS3” in Playstation 4

Mark Cerny of Playstation spoke at the Gamelab conference in Barcelona, talking primarily about how developers wanted much more power out of the Playstation 4 than they had first anticipated.

"Involving the third-parties was tricky," said Cerny. "We definitely wanted their input on the design but we felt that it would be a bad idea to go to the teams who are making the top PlayStation 3 titles in 2008 and 2009 and start briefing them on a system that wouldn't be released for many years.

Cerny then talked about how they would address this issue, noting that it felt like a "tremendous distraction." A questionnaire was sent to a myriad of third-party developers, asking about things such as CPU counts, CPU types, GPU types and bandwidth. Also discussed was what these developers would want from a next-generation console.

"And the answers were predictable," said Cerny. "Basically the teams said that if we can afford to give them 1,000 times the performance of the PS3 then go ahead, do it."

"But, more importantly, we asked about the flavour of those systems that they would like to see in next-generation games console and the ratios that they would like to see between the various components."

Lastly, Cerny talked about how developers "weren't fooled for a minute by the abstract nature of the questionnaire. Everyone we sat down with knew that we were asking for feedback on the design of the PS4."

What came back were some very interesting points related to the system's GPU. However, the ideas brought up weren't able to be enacted upon, as it would have required the development team to start from scratch. The GPU's nuances would have to be learned by the team and progress on the PS4's architecture would have likely been scrapped.