In an interview with Polygon, Playstayion 4 lead architect Mark Cerny elaborated on what he has said before, in that the Playstation 4’s true potential will be seen in the future.
This time, Cerny revealed that the developers will realize the console’s graphical potential in three to four years.
“It’s a supercharged PC architecture, so you can use it as if it were a PC with unified memory,” he said.
“Much of what we’re seeing with the launch titles is that usage; it’s very, very quick to get up to speed if that’s how you use it. But at the same time, then you’re not taking advantage of all the customisation that we did in the GPU. I think that really will play into the graphical quality and the level of interaction in the worlds in, say, year three or year four of the console.”
Cerny also says the target was to meet 10 times the PlayStation 3’s performance in order to differentiate the titles between the two consoles.
“When I did pitches to developers about the hardware, I talked about what I call the Akihabara test. Akihabara is an electronics district in Tokyo, it’s just full of stores where you can buy just about anything you plug into a wall socket.
“I knew that at some point, there’d be out on the sidewalk a PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, and they might even be showing the same game, and the PlayStation 4 had to be powerful enough that when people walked by, they had to look at the PlayStation 4 and say, ‘Wow, I have to have that.’
“I believe we are at that level of performance,” Cerny claimed.
“I mean, the million pre-orders we have is, I think, speaking to that.”
