If you’re a fan of graphics technology in gaming, chances are you’ll really dig the lengthy article published by Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, which explores Killzone: Shadow Fall from a technical point of view. They also gathered the thoughts and opinions of the main coders at Guerrilla Games, and they confirmed that as impressive as the latest Killzone is, there’s a lot of room for growth thanks to the power of the PlayStation 4.
We still have a long way to go. We’re very early in the cycle. The PS4 is very easy to work with and I think we got quite far, but whatever we do next will be even better because we always constantly push the technology. On Killzone 2, we were thinking OK, we went really far with this. Killzone 3 showed that we could pretty much double our budgets because we got so much better with the technology that we could use more. I’m pretty sure we have much more room to improve here
As a few have already guessed by gauging the strength of the hardware, this is mainly due to the utilization of GPU Compute, which is quite minimal in the launch titles but is expected to grow significantly in the coming years.
We try to utilize as much [of the GPU] as possible. There are synchronous things which need to happen in sync with the rendering, but there are asynchronous things which can happen at any point so we try to utilize everything. We’ve only touched the surface. We picked the force-fields, the color correction system, memory defragmentation - that’s what we use for the texture streaming. Those are a couple of things we picked as isolated systems that really work well with compute, so we tried those. Most of our other stuff works with regular pixel shaders, even some post-processing effects, so we will be improving. It’s natural that we pick the post-processing effects and turn them into compute as that’s much more efficient, so that’s our next step - but we only had so much time for this game. I’m pretty sure we can improve a lot - there’s a lot of room to explore
Killzone: Shadow Fall debuted along with the PS4 launch in North America on the 15th November, and will be released (just as the console itself) in Europe and other territories in Central/South America and Australia/New Zealand on 29th November. Look for our review shortly after that.
