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Forums - Sony - Contrast Dev On PS4′s 8 GB GDDR5 RAM: “Still Scratching Our Heads As To What To Do With It All”

gooch_destroyer on 21 July 2013

Sam Abbott says that it should be “much easier to develop for PS4 than PS3″.

21st, Jul. 2013 | Posted in News | by Ravi Sinha
 
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Ravi Sinha


We recently spoke to Compulsions Games’ Sam Abbott – currently developing Contrast for the PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. We asked him how does the PS4’s unified architecture and 8GB of RAM help bring Contrast to life.

Abbot responded that, “Haha, well, it makes it really easy to get onto their platform! There is so much memory and so many cores on that machine we’re still scratching our head as to what to do with all of them.”

With all the talk going around about how easy it is to develop for the console, as well as to bring PC games over (as Warframe developer Digital Extremes recently attested to), we asked Abbott if it was as simple as just picking up the PC code and pasting it on to the PS4?

“It’s definitely a lot easier than on the previous generation of consoles where the architecture was much more divergent from PCs, but it’s also not as simple as cut & paste .Once the industry has had a few months to iron out its kinks, it should be much easier to develop for the PS4 than for the PS3.”

Published by Focus Home Interactive, Contrast is expected to release in Q3 of 2013.

Stay tuned for the complete interview scheduled to be published next week.

http://gamingbolt.com/contrast-dev-on-ps4s-8-gb-gddr5-ram-still-scratching-our-heads-as-to-what-to-do-with-it-all



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Th3PANO on 21 July 2013

So much memory will make developers lazy. Just look at that Indy game that uses 5 GB of RAM already.



Locknuts on 21 July 2013

I don't think hardware will be a limiting factor this coming gen. Budgets and ambition will.



Blood_Tears on 21 July 2013
Th3PANO said:
So much memory will make developers lazy. Just look at that Indy game that uses 5 GB of RAM already.

Jonathan Blow's game The Witness doesn't look lazy to me imo.



HoloDust on 21 July 2013
Th3PANO said:
So much memory will make developers lazy. Just look at that Indy game that uses 5 GB of RAM already.


"That" indie game (and I'm sure you're referring to Witness) seems to be holding whole island and all those hi-res textures in RAM at all times. Why should they stream if they don't have to and PS4 allows them not to.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure Rockstar, Bethesda, CD Projekt RED and lot of others will more than know what to do with all that RAM.



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Raven722 on 21 July 2013
Th3PANO said:
So much memory will make developers lazy. Just look at that Indy game that uses 5 GB of RAM already.


Having a large resource ceiling does not make for lazy developers. It will make them realize that they can do a lot more than what they could with a console that has a very limited amount of it and developers will want to use that to realize their vision for a game. They can actually make their games a lot more complex. Last time I checked, complexity is rarely the result of laziness. There were a great deal of what many people would consider to be lazy games on the Wii, a very low spec platform for its time.



Ljink96 on 21 July 2013

That is the thing, you really don't need it all. These companies are going all out and they are wasting time and resources to do so. Yeah you may be powerful but power comes at a cost. Well, you can't complain as a developer I guess. But games always seem cooler when you have to work around limitations and restrictions. It shows what a company is truly made of. I hate complainers though.



DarkTemplar on 21 July 2013

Maybe it is finally time to get ride of the long and boring load screens.

I mean, even if the game do not need the whole memory available to run, developers can use the remaining free space to prefetch the next level of the game.



Th3PANO on 21 July 2013
Blood_Tears said:
Th3PANO said:
So much memory will make developers lazy. Just look at that Indy game that uses 5 GB of RAM already.

Jonathan Blow's game The Witness doesn't look lazy to me imo.


By lazy I mean not optimized at all. The Witness doesn't look like a game that needs 5 gig's of GDDR 5 Ram, no PC Game ever needed it lol.



Th3PANO on 21 July 2013
Raven722 said:
Th3PANO said:
So much memory will make developers lazy. Just look at that Indy game that uses 5 GB of RAM already.


Having a large resource ceiling does not make for lazy developers. It will make them realize that they can do a lot more than what they could with a console that has a very limited amount of it and developers will want to use that to realize their vision for a game. They can actually make their games a lot more complex. Last time I checked, complexity is rarely the result of laziness. There were a great deal of what many people would consider to be lazy games on the Wii, a very low spec platform for its time.


Specs =/= creativity - and the lazy games weren't lazy cause of the specs, they were lazy cause they wanted to make quick profit out of the motion controls.