Shadow Fall trailer used just over 4gb of RAM, says tech lead
The graphically impressive Killzone 4 technical demo only scratched the surface of what the PS4 is capable of, says the lead tech at Guerrilla Games.
In a presentation going into extensive technical detail on the debut trailer for Killzone: Shadow Fall, Michal Valient said the studio aimed to present the video at 1080p running at a constant 30fps, which he felt it had achieved.
He said that the game’s demo only used 3gb of the console’s GDDR5 RAM on video resources, with a further 1.5gb dedicated to system resources. This leaves just under 4gb worth of RAM spare, a factor that likely wasn’t expected during the development of the trailer given the late decision to include 8gb of RAM into the hardware.
Comparing code running in specific jobs from the PS3 to the PS4, he said that the next-gen hardware was much easier to program, as it house one main ‘orchestrator’ thread while allowing all other code to run in jobs across all of the system’s cores.
The polygon count for the in-game characters meanwhile has increased significantly between Killzone 3 and Killzone 4, with Shadowfall boasting around 40k polygons for the highest LOD, while Killzone 3 used 10k polygons.