Uncharted used less than half PS3's power

Naughty Dog used barely half of the PS3's power to run Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, one of the best-looking games on the console.

So says designer Richard Lemarchand, who says tools such as Edge - developed by senior first-party Sony programmers including some from Naughty Dog - are now in place and ready to begin harnessing the full power of the Cell processor.

Remember, the Cell processor is made up of eight Synergistic Processor Units, six of which can be used to do things at any one time.

"These guys are really old-school programmers: guys who are always looking to shave another cycle off an operation. And part of the skill of developing for the PlayStation 3 is getting the GPU to farm jobs out to the six SPUs - seeing which SPUs are idling and can take up some of the slack in a frame-to-frame kind of way," Lemarchand told ThreeSpeech.

"That's why we think we're probably only using 30 or 40 per cent of the power of the PS3 right now, and there's this great, untapped potential.

"All third-party developers can get the Edge libraries for free and are going to be able to use them in their own ways, to get more and more and more out of the PS3 over the years," he said.

Lemarchand went talked of the sense of sharing between first-party studios, trading "war stories" with Evolution (MotorStorm), Insomniac (Resistance), and Sucker Punch (InFamous).

More encouraging is the close bond Naughty Dog shares with Sony Santa Monica, which is developing God of War 3. Apparently the two studios meet reguarly to discuss development tactics over lunch.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune recently became the first Blu-ray title to offer Trophy support.