Hi to you all, I'm new here so don't be hard on me it's the first thread I start and I don't know if you already debated this .

I hope you understand by % I'm referring to use of the capabilities of the console (Calculations, Graphics, Sound ...).

As many of you have seen MGS4 is expected to be a system-seller game and I don't doubt it, it's simply amazing ... the gameplay, the graphics (true-HD ), the A.I., wow! many many things (I'm not a MGS fan but I must admit it this game seems great).

Watching all this game features I believe that this game has to use a lot of power of the PS3, I would say that it uses more than a 50% the PS3 can give, but it would be too early to take full advantage of the PS3 so I would say that it would not pass a 70%.

I'm making an speculation here although it would be interesting (and better) to make a  research and show data to make calculations.

I cant remember which developer so i cant provide a link, but someone was saying while their game did use ALL the power of the PS3, that as time passed they would find better ways to use that power. So basically MGS4 will probably use 95% of what the PS3 has to offer, its just that the same power will be better used by developers in the future as they discover different ways to apply it. The same logic applies to the 360 and the Wii.

Welcome to VGChartz by the way! The PS3 is a very powerful console as I'm betting that the console probably won't be used to full capacity in about 3 years from now! As for MGS4, I would say that would use about 40-60% of the PS3's capacity.

The percentage of theoritical performance used in game is mainly meaningless marketing speak ... Rarely does the number quoted have any attachment to reality or represent anything meaningful in terms of graphics, physics or AI.

With a system like the PS2 it was able to produce far better looking/playing games later in its life more often because developers found a work around or hack that allowed them to implement a version of something with far less processing power; late generation PS2 games that looked close to XBox and Gamecube games used similar ammounts of processing power as the early PS2 games that looked worse than Dreamcast games.

I would go ??%. As a couple developers have stated that they arn't sure how much the PS3 can do or not.

Even if you did know it's not that helpful a stat since different developers and coders.

Some guy might use 99% of the PS3's power.

While another guy might be able to make the same game only using 70% of the PS3's power buy being smarter with how he coded it. I think. I'm no expert on coding however. Don't have the patience.

^^^That's true I guess!!!^^^

If you wanted to define % used as "amount of hardware resources used that are available in terms of memory, time and fillrate" then I'd speculate that most games on the market right now use between 80% and 100% of the graphics fillrate, video and main system memory, and available CPU slices. Lair, for example, seems to require well over 100% of the PS3 and seems to require at least twice as much fillrate as the PS3 has just to get a normal framerate.

Suggesting that a game uses "less than 100%" of a system is naive in at least one way: a single bottleneck on the system limits the performance of the game. So, effectively, as soon as you are bottlenecked at one point you've set an upper limit on the performance you can squeeze out of the system. You could say that there is some headroom in terms of fill rate, CPU slices, or available memory (graphics or main), and perhaps you could use those values to quantify "less than 100%", but don't anticipate that a game is going to be released looking and running twice as good as Lair, for example, because it likely won't happen.

The fact of the matter is that the PS3 has a fairly weak video card by todays standards and only 256MB of main system memory, approximately 80MB of which are consumed by the OS.  It's not a lot of resource to work with.  The only question mark is the cell, because game developers see a lot of floating point potential there and could possibly come up with tasks that the cell is well suited toward.  But in the general, it doesn't provide as much general purpose power as the 360's CPU cores do.

@TheBigFatJ

I completely understand your point and agree , but the % I'm talking about is not about the resources used, I mean it's a console a game can use almost all the resources as you posted, what I was asking is if this game can use these resources in a way that they can tell the players something like "hey we tried to squeeze all of the PS3 with this game yet we couldn't, the system still can offer us more" I hope I made myself a little bit more clear.

Hmm... no offense, but this question is kind of pointless. Nobody here knows ANYTHING about the actual game programming, so you'll get this:

PS3 fans: "I'd say no more than 20%. While playing MGS, teh cell has to calculate Pi just to avoid falling asleep"
X360 fans: "130%. The PS3 can't handle it watch teh framerate crawl"
Wii fans: "Who cares it's about teh gameplay stoopid"

Every game uses 100% of a console resources. When they say this game uses X per cent of this platform power they mean theoretical power. After years of research to better optimize you're code to that platform, you can get closer to the theoretical limits.

That said, Ps3 theoretical limit is VERY hard to achieve, much more than any console mainly because of cell radically different design. I'm expecting MGS4 to use 50-60 of Ps3 power and no game ever to use more than 90%.