[B3D Interview]Q&A with Evolution Studios' technical director Scott Kirkland

[Carl B]

SPEs can be utilized to aid in lighting, geometry work, and particle systems to name a few. Although in the interview Kirkland focused on the potential vertex alleviation provided to RSX, the truth is that there are a number of areas in which the SPEs can help graphically (and can link to my own past references in that regard). That said, yes I'm really trying to keep things away from E3/CGI discussions here, so let's try and stay away from the notion/idea of whether E3 2005 is plausible. Even the semantics surrounding what qualifies as 'matching' said CGI can be explosive.

 

[Nesh]

Yes! That's the one. It's quite annoying hearing people saying "Oh since it only uses 15% Spu it can easily be done on the 360"...the reply I would give is...yes, so what? We're not talking about the 360, we're talking about this game here and now, on this platform and how it uses the GPU and CPU. Comparisons get old very quickly in my eyes...especially for exclusive games

Well I can only agree with you.

Although I didnt imply anything about the usage of the SPUs and 360. Just the games theirselves

 

[Shifty Geezer]

and not the actual in-game quality of the graphics (i.e. AA, textures, framerate, etc.).

SPE's can be used for lots of things. Check out the Edge discussion on how the SPE's lend a hand in rendering graphics by optimizing what RSX has to render.

Therefore it is illogical to think that things will ever approach the 2005 trailer as the requirements to do so are mostly fill-rate and memory based... both of which SPEs can do nothing to improve.

Some things will never be equalled, like IQ. However there will likely be improvements in the visuals for the above mentioned fact - SPE's can be used for all sorts of things, including graphical tasks; either rendering graphics (like dust effects) or helping RSX render them.

 

[PSman]

"MotorStorm only uses between 15 and 20 percent of available SPU resource, so we’re aiming to achieve a 5 fold increase in SPU performance, which should allow us to do some awesome stuff!"

F***ing AMAZING!

The best looking next-gen game(so far) is only using 15-20% of the SPU!?

The future look very bright for the PS3 IMHO

 

[jonnyp]

I don't particularly find Motorstorm either that impressive visually or fun ... so I have to disagree with this comment... especially if its actually directly related to motorstorm...

Ninja Gaiden looks pretty good... F1 is ok, VF5 needs way better skin shaders but I personally think DOA4 visually is just as impressive... I just dont see any differences in the consoles yet in terms of anything that would cause you to make this statement... However I do think Blast factor could be end up being better than Geometry wars!

Carl Thanks for the interview. You work waaaaaay harder than Scott did.

I've yet to see a racing game released on 360 that looks that good or better though...