PlayStation 4 games that are released in both 2013 and 2014 will not take advantage of every aspect of the GPU. In fact, we’ll likely see much better looking, and playing, games a few years after the hardware launches. Developers will have to grow familiar with the console and all of its sudden nuances before they’re able to really shock the gaming community with something they’ve never seen done before, and according to PS4 architect Mark Cerny, game creators will be able to improve the simulation of virtual worlds without sacrificing graphics.
“If you look at a frame and everything that’s being done in that frame, a lot of faces within that frame don’t really use all the various modules in the GPU,” Cerny told IGN in an extended interview. “So, most likely, three or four years in, once you’ve taken time to study the architecture, you can improve the quality of the world simulation without decreasing the quality of the graphics.”
What this hopefully means is that worlds can continue to expand and become more populated with activities, all without the actual quality of the presentation taking a dip. The new power of the PlayStation 4 hardware will be able to maintain a specific level of quality no matter the increase in game scope, and really, that’s an exciting thing to hear from the leading architect. Open-world titles like Watch Dogs may not benefit from this fact this year, but it’s still exciting to look at the future of where software might go.