Naughty Dog is owned by Sony, and while the developer makes wonderful games, it's very clear why we were there: to talk about the power of the PlayStation 3.

Balestra pointed out how important it is to ship every system with a hard drive. "The fact that every PS3 has a hard drive is huge for us." He went on to describe how the game takes advantage of Sony's offerings. "It's the combination of Blu-ray and hard drive. You can play the entire game without loading. We don't require an install. We're doing all the post-processing effects on the SPUs [Synergistic Processing Units].

[...]

For the first game, Balestra estimated that they used around 30 percent of the power of the SPUs, now the team was able to use them to 100 percent capacity. Naughty Dog understands the Cell processor, and knows how to get it to sing. "The ability to use the RSX [the PS3's graphics processor] to draw your pixels on the screen, then you use the Cell to do gameplay and animations—we kind of took the step of using the Cell process to help the RSX . All those things are done on the Cell processor," he explained. "It really helps us getting that quality of lighting per pixel; the amount of computation is pretty crazy."

Naughty Dog also used the SPUs to add physics to the sound so things occlude properly. That means that if you're behind a door, the sound will reflect that. Effects will sound different depending on where your character is in relation to the source. "All that math is done on SPUs to immerse players into the environment," he said. If you have a surround-sound setup for your PS3, this could very well be your new showcase title.

[...]

Uncharted 2 is going to be a showpiece title for the PlayStation 3, and Balestra notes that the knowledge and technical know-how used to create the game is something the team shares. "One thing we did for Uncharted is that we made the source code available to all the first parties," he explained. There is a team at Naughty Dog that's separate from those working on the game; their mandate is to work on technology that's shared with both first- and third-parties.

"They know how we're using the SPUs; they are free to look at how we're doing things and package it in such a way that it can be shared with third parties," Balestra told Ars. 

Developers from Naughty Dog give talks at GDC, and the team often has third-party developers coming into the offices to discuss PlayStation 3 tech. Balestra said they have time set aside to speak with other developers after the game is finished—as of this writing they're nine days away from submission.

"We're very open, yes. That's part of our jobs."