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Naughty Dog 'Not Itching for New Hardware'

Posted January 4, 2010 by David Radd

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was perhaps the most acclaimed title of 2009, named the best game at E3, and heralded as Game of the Year by Metacritic, Spike TV and the AP. While the game's technical excellence would seem to leave little room for improvement, Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells has indicated to G4 that they aren't looking ahead to a potential PS4.

“We're pretty comfortable with the PS3, and we made a very big advancement between the first game and the second game; we're really tapping into the Cell processor, but there's more there. The first game, it was idle about 70 percent of the time, which we rectified for the sequel, and now it's at least busy 100 percent of the time, but it's still not fully-optimized code. I mean, in order to get to that 100 percent, it was more about making sure the pipeline was filled, and we weren't running into one of the processors becoming idle because there wasn't a job ready for it. But now we have to go into all of those routines and optimize them so we can get even more done using that Cell processor. It really feels that sometimes it's this bottomless pit of processing power; you find the right kind of job for it and it can just churn through those things so fast, which really helps with a lot of our rendering and post-processing effects.”

“So yes, we're getting comfortable. No, we're not itching for new hardware. I would love to keep working on the PlayStation [3] for 5 or 6 more years...I think there's still a lot to get out of it. We're not really feeling limited by the hardware; it's more about the hours of the day and how quickly we want to get the next game out.”

Wells has said in the past that he's confident that Naughty Dog can squeeze additional performance out of the PS3.

David Radd has worked as a gaming journalist since 2004 at sites such as GamerFeed, Gigex and GameDaily Biz.