Easier than the PS2
Sony's Playstation 3 uses Open GL as its graphics API, this means that anyone who has developed games for the PC will instantly be familiar with the set-up - in fact the PS3 uses a cut down version called Open GL ES.
The Guardian Unlimted have interviewed a leading PS3 programmer from Volatile. Lyndon Homewood said, "ES is designed for things like set-top boxes and mobile phones, where you want the fundamental graphics but don't need some of the fringe stuff that Open GL has. Because you've got that on PS3, it's going to be much easier than the PS2 to get something up and running - there are hundreds of books out there for it, so you can do your background reading. All the documentation is there."
Sounds great for the developer, but will this mean an influx of 'under par', rushed games on Sony's new console?
On the subject of the programming language Cg, Lyndon said, "Cg gives you a standard documented API for programming graphics chips. The main two segregations of Cg programming are the vertex shader and pixel shader. With the vertex shader you can act on 3D models at the vertex level, so for each triangle you can do something on each corner and then everything in-between is interpolated. So if you want to make your whole shape bigger, you can just push all the vertices out a bit. In this way you could, say, morph your character into a giant just by scaling up all the verts. It's a lot easier to get to that point in the graphics pipeline.
And then you've got the pixel shaders. When you render each triangle on screen the GPU asks whether you want to do something to each individual pixel you render... so at this point you could run some sort of mathematical algorithm on each individual pixel - perhaps a lighting effect like high dynamic range lighting (a rough Wikipedia entry on HDR lighting can be found here). And that wasn't possible on PS2.
All of this is already available and won't be a massive leap from what you're seeing on PCs with high-end graphics cards. But obviously on PS3, you've got eight chips to spread the processing cost over - the main PowerPC chip and seven SPE chips. In a PC, there's just one CPU, two in a dual processor machine. Having an eight CPU multi-processor system in your living room is pretty flash."
Commenting on the different between the PS3 and Xbox 360 capabilities Volatile have stated that the PS3 will be better for HD cinematics, due to its Blu-Ray storage.
Check out the full interview here
