It has reached its limits

Jun 16, 2009 17:01 GMT  ·  By

The console war has been waged on the hardware side as much as on the software side of things. From companies boasting that they have the most powerful devices to the most complete set of services, you will always hear corporate executives giving out statements such as that.

But it is always up to the third-party developers to really give out verdicts. Now, it is the turn of the Crytek CEO, Cevat Yerli, to throw a few statements on the console fire. After the company's long-time partner, EA, declared that it had maxed out on the Xbox 360, but that it still had a long way to go on the PS3, the creators of the newly announced Crysis 2 revealed that it would max out the Sony console.

“The interesting thing is we did run a performance analysis on the PS3 devkit, and you know the funny thing is the occupation on all the CPUs, the Cell and the GPUs, is pretty much – the needle is at the limit. There’s not much more you can do and frankly the breakthrough was very recent, and otherwise we would’ve had a compromised strategy on the consoles, which we don’t have now.”

The executive explained that the development team was barely able to implement all of the things it wanted. “So I think we will still have an upside, but we’re touching the hardware limits already. We do develop very, very low level to get that performance out. Like I said, we started three years ago in the research of technology, and we had to dig very deep into the hardware to find the reserves, and say ‘oh, we have 2% more here, and 1% more here,’ and that allowed us actually to get to where we are.”

However, don't think that this will mean that the Xbox 360 version of Crysis 2 won't be as nice as the PS3 one. “I mean essentially the game we run is about the same. Probably one’s stronger on the GPU side, one’s stronger on the CPU side, so depending on what you’re doing where, the PS3 does perform here sometimes better, the 360 performs other things better, but overall by the time the game ships it’ll be absolutely the same.”

If the EA statement has been a bit out of place, let's not forget that Crytek has a history of pushing hardware to the edge of what it can do, with titles such as Far Cry or the original Crysis making computers cry for quite some time.