Quote Originally Posted by Perforu View Post
So my guess was that PS3's computing power is far more than present games need (including Wipeout HD).
Not at all. Wipeout was using a fair large percentage of the available power in the PS3. Of course there are areas which we could have done better or differently, and I'm sure the team will carry on learning and sqeezing where they can and making room on the processors for even more cool effects and features.

The main thing here is that, based on our understanding of the technology at the time, we wrote the engine then tried to use it to do as much as we could in the available time. Certain types of thing, such as particle effects can vary in rendering time exponentially depending on how big they are drawn on the screen, meaning that sometimes the rendering cost would shoot up drastically to levels that were impossible to render at 60Hz. This is just a fact of life with modern day GPUs and you see the same effect on ANY platform.

So in those situations, we throttle to smooth out the lumps. But these are exceptions... you need to look at the "flat" performance of the game under normal situations to really judge the performance...

Sorry if this seems like a rambling argument, but you must understand that the performance of modern games like these are subject to a lot of different factors which can sometimes fight against each other. We have to come up with strategies for rendering "general" situations optimally and then clever tricks to cover the exceptions!