Mastering PS4 Compute Yields Massive Gains,Like PS3 CELL

Zombie Studios agreed to speak with us about Daylight, the procedurally generated horror game releasing tomorrow on PC and PlayStation 4. The full interview will be available tomorrow along with our review, but in the meantime here’s an excerpt where they mention the massive benefits of properly using Compute on PlayStation 4 for the future games on the platform.

Properly utilizing Compute shader functionality can certainly add a lot of life to a game, and as developers mature with the new hardware we should expect massive gains from offloading highly parallel tasks from the CPU to the GPU.  The trick will be defining what processes are good for Compute shaders to take over. Mastering Compute on the PS4 will be similar to mastering CELL on the PS3, but it has the advantage of being a technology that is valid for all current platforms.

This comes after Infamous Second Son’s postmortem, where Sucker Punch mentioned that PS4 Compute represents the future of developing games on Sony’s latest console. Also, it reiterates that even though PS4 is generally more similar to a PC in architecture, with each year we can expect massive improvements, similarly to PS3 games; moreover, as mentioned by Zombie Studios, this time Compute isn’t a strange technology only available on this platform, but can be exploited on all platforms, including Xbox One (even though Microsoft’s console has less Compute Units).

 

This hopefully means that unlike PS3, where notoriously the best looking games such as The Last of Us, Beyond, God of War 3, Killzone 3 etc. were all coming from first party studios who properly exploited CELL, with PS4 and Compute even third party studios will find advantageous to research this technology, since it can be used on multiple platforms, albeit to a different extent based on the hardware.