ND have said before that they downscale the engine to work on the PS3 hence the rumor that there would be a PS4 version of the Last of Us. Whereas I've posted screenshots on here of the PC version of Black Ops 2 maxed out and it looks like a game straight out of 2007.

In this interview with Evan Wells he talks about the reasoning for this transition. Basically, back in the PS2 days Sony had no cohesive development environment. Every dev was basically doing their own thing on the first party side, and that caused a lot of wasted time and money.

In 2005 Sony established Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios. With this they started a network were all devs could share tech in a fast efficient way. So now if Guerrilla writes a super efficient texture streaming code, Naughty Dog can pick that up and drop it into their engine. This way they are starting with something that already works very well and building from there. This new network also allowed 3rd parties to take advantage of code written by other developers.

So, even though they are still using the same engine, it is an engine that will evolve over time. By the end of this gen, most of the engine will be completely new. Doing things this way will allow them to get right on the ball developing a game for the PS4, and not stress everyone out building an engine to build a game. This will also assure that they can continually one up themselves with each new title on PS4.

http://www.vg247.com/2013/02/19/naughty-dog-wont-repeat-mistakes-of-previous-console-transition/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCE_Worldwide_Studios

Hopefully this piece of information along with the Last of Us 2 & 3 registered domains paint the picture for the future.

They won't have to start from square one, so if the game does well in a year from now we could be probably comparing head to head the last of us 1 and the last of us 2.

This. Also nice Avatar. 

I think carrying the PS3 engine forward to PS4 might mean incremental improvement rather than order of magnitude improvement. Will be interesting to see what GG and SSM do. If they go for a fresh start they might leap ahead of ND in 1st party graphics supremacy.

LOL comparing COD engine too ND's engine.. to put it in simple words The last of US looks better than COD on xbone. Even Killzone SF is using the same old engine from PS3 and the difference between KSF and Ghost is a whole generation apart.. not to mention Frostbite 3 was developed over Fb2. On the other hand a tech from two generations before for a game with highest revenue income, still havent had a worthy upgrade!

And I have heard equal number of Xbox fans voicing similar opinion about the COD barring u. So ur not defending MS or COD its just ur hating Sony. So in a nutshell ur attempts to defend COD ghost engine or ur attempt to rub it in face of PS fans fails at level of COD dog.

both of them confirmed they will be using the same engine as they are scalable, very few dev this generation will build new engine from scratch, and that too because if their current engine has a faulty base code. 

i guess only Evolution studio and Quantic dream will be using new engines.

When your engine already looks next-genisshh I don't see a problem with keeping it and improving it.

I can't imagine any developer is going to be building a new engine any more. Most "new" engines are built upon the core of the previous engine with improvements and upgrades (either visually, mechanically or in terms of ease of development) added when they're needed.

It's not like CryEngine 3 to 4 is going to be a new engine. Same is true of Frostbite, Bethesda's (which they actually claimed was new for Skyrim when it was blatantly an upgrade) and Unreal.

Basically, Naughty Dog used a really odd design language and they couldn't take anything forward from PS2 to PS3 and that was really tough for them

The PS4 is much easier to code for, so they should be able to adjust their engine to deal with it, especially as they will have had a hand in the design of the PS4.

It will save them some time, though I still wouldn't expect another ND game this year unfortunately