Digital Foundry: On the face of it the bigger GPU and wider bandwidth of the PlayStation 4 makes it far more powerful than the Xbox One. Yet developers like John Carmack - and even PC benchmarks on equivalent hardware - suggest that the two platforms may be closer than the specs suggest. What's your assessment?

Cevat Yerli: Both next-gen platforms have excellent specs and provide wins against each other in a variety of areas. But, in essence, both of them are going to run next-generation games in more or less the same quality due to the diminishing returns of optimising for these little differences. That being said, platform-exclusive titles might be able to take advantage of these slight variations on both Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Digital Foundry: What's your take on Sony's emphasis on PS4 GPU compute? In multi-platform projects is it likely to be explored?

Cevat Yerli: GPU compute is definitely the future. The CPU performance is better than last-gen but not by a huge margin, the GPU on the other hand is a really sizeable improvement. If the task is suited to it, moving to the GPU can be an incredible performance win. However, this is taking away performance from the traditional graphics pipeline so there is a limit to what you can move to the GPU. As for the broader multi-platform question, supporting GPU compute isn't really much more difficult than supporting multi-platform rendering, so it's certainly something we'll be using more and more on all platforms.

Digital Foundry: There were hopes that next-gen console would target 60fps - something John Carmack mentioned in his QuakeCon keynote this year. Can you talk us through the thinking behind Ryse as a 30fps game?

Cevat Yerli: Developers always have to choose whether they go for 60 or 30fps, depending on the type of game and complexity of the project. With Ryse, we wanted to go for a very emotional experience with complex and dramatic lighting, high fidelity environments, and rich characters and character animations. So 30fps was our choice, and we believe that most developers will go for richer worlds at 30 frames per second rather than 60fps - which would call for compromises, as 60fps demands twice the amount of compute rendering speed. 30fps is a standard that is above, for example, what most cinemas use for showing films. Early demos with higher frame-rate experiences have shown that gamers and viewers have a mixed opinion about its perceived quality - for example, how 48fps cinema experiences were received. So it's both a production design choice as well as user research.

full interview here

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-crytek-the-next-generation

They do point out that it is slightly out of date and took place over a wide period of time, so not everything is quite up to date

I've always had the feeling that Crytek hasn't really done any reasonable work at all on the PS4 yet. They are under pressure to deliver Ryse on the XBox One on day one in best quality so that would be understandable. But then there are snippets in the interview like "However, this is taking away performance from the traditional graphics pipeline so there is a limit to what you can move to the GPU." which tells me that either Yerli doesn't really understand how gpgpu is supposed to work or they haven't looked into it. The whole point of gpgpu on the PS4 is to use the ACUs capabilities to interleave graphics and general computation, so that snippet alone makes me really wonder.