“All these amazing particles and effects that the hero can do and that is a whole new sub system.”

“Physics simulation, collision detection, ray casting for audio, decompression and the like. And these operations are fine grained meaning that there will be many small world simulation tasks running on the GPU simultaneously alongside rendering of the game scenes. So the concept is that as game developers learn to use these techniques later on in the console life cycle, we will see richer and even more interactive worlds,” Mark Cerny said at the time.

“Some of it has been straight forward improvements across the board in terms of the way that lighting and specularity works on surfaces, but there is other areas like particle effects and this is really a big part of Second Son, all these amazing particles and effects that the hero can do and that is a whole new sub system. We wrote that [code] from the ground up to be targeted at the PlayStation 4 hardware and the whole system takes the work that our effects artists do and compiles it to actually run directly on the graphics chip so it does not even run on the main computer [cpu]. It runs entirely on the graphics system. It lets us have incredible scale, huge number of particles, spectacular effects that we could not have done in any other way," he said in an interview with GamerHub.