E3: Crysis 2 'Maxing Out' the PS3

In an interview with Gamasutra, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli denied the Sony assertion that it would take developers years to maximize the potential of the PS3, with Hirai stating that "We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?" Talking in the wake of the announcement that EA would be publishing Crysis 2, Yerli said that "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." Here, he was implying that Crysis 2, running on the company's new CryEngine 3 would almost max out the PS3's abilities. "There’s not much more you can do," he added, "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. "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." Crytek is known for its technical excellence, and we also quizzed Yerli on his impressions of the differences between the two HD platforms. "I mean essentially the game we run is about the sam," he said. "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."