Cerny: Devs Will Get More From PS4 in ‘Year Three or Four’

Speaking to Polygon at gamescom last week the PlayStation 4's lead system architect, Mark Cerny, has said developers will get creative with the console as they become more experienced at producing games for it. 

"We set our target at 10 times the PlayStation 3's performance, because that's what we felt we needed to achieve in order to differentiate the titles," Cerny said.

"When I did pitches to developers about the hardware, I talked about what I call the Akihabara test. Akihabara is a electronics district in Tokyo, it's just full of stores where you can buy just about anything you plug into a wall socket. I knew that at some point, there'd be out on the sidewalk a PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, and they might even be showing the same game, and the PlayStation 4 had to be powerful enough that when people walked by, they had to look at the PlayStation 4 and say, 'Wow, I have to have that.'

He says the power of the PS4 means they achieved the goal of sufficiently differentiating between current and next-gen titles. 

"I believe we are at that level of performance," he commented. "I mean, the million pre-orders we have is, I think, speaking to that."

Cerny says that while some gamers may argue about the graphical prowess of the PS4 over the PS3 there were similar complaints at the start of the current console generation. 

"Believe it or not, at the PlayStation 3 launch, I was hearing a lot about how PlayStation 3 graphics aren't really different from PlayStation 2" Cerny added. "I think that speaks to both how large people's expectations are, and also how launch titles are not fully exploiting the hardware."

He insists that developers aren't finding the PS4 difficult to develop for but rather that it will take time for them to get to grips with all of the option available on the console. 

"It's a supercharged PC architecture, so you can use it as if it were a PC with unified memory," Cerny said. "Much of what we're seeing with the launch titles is that usage; it's very, very quick to get up to speed if that's how you use it. But at the same time, then you're not taking advantage of all the customization that we did in the GPU. I think that really will play into the graphical quality and the level of interaction in the worlds in, say, year three or year four of the console."