Uncharted only tapping 30% of PS3's SPU

I am somewhat reticent to post any story comparing the power of one console to another. But with the release of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune only one week away, Playstation Universe took the opportunity to chat up Co-President of Naughty Dog, Christophe Balestra and question him on the technology behind the game. Some interesting tidbits are unveiled, including how important the Cell processor and Blu-ray were to the development of the game. He does not specifically mention any other console, but he does say he thinks the game could only have been made on the PS3. Whether or not that is actually true is for more technically knowledgeable people than myself to judge, but it makes for an interesting read.

According to Balestra, "The main thing about the PlayStation 3 is the Cell processor and more specifically the SPU's. We are only using 30 percent of the power of the SPU's in Uncharted. We've been architecting a lot of our systems around this and we were able to take full advantage of that power. A big part of our systems is running on SPU's: scene bucketing, particles, physics, collision, animation, water simulation, mesh processing, path finding, etc. For our engine, the cool thing about having the SPU's is the fact we can minimize what we send to the RSX (the graphic chip), it allows us to reject unnecessary information and get the RSX to be very efficient." So, essentially, what he is saying if I'm understanding correctly is, the size of the Blu-Ray disc allows them to feed information to the SPU's and hard drive to take some load away from the underpowered RSX GPU.

If he is correct about Uncharted using only 30% of the PS3's SPU, then I would assume that means we could see some incredible stuff coming down the pike; at least from the developers that fully understand the console's architecture.

Via Playstation Universe