Fary Cry 2 dev pleased by PS3 SPU efficiency

Ubisoft Montreal tech director, Dominic Guay, has revealed that the team responsible for bringing Far Cry 2 to PS3 did harbour early concerns over the feasibility of bringing the ambitions open-world FPS to the console.

“We were somewhat worried by some of the reported high complexity of developing for the PS3,” said Guay, “but the raw processing power is impressive.”

In order to get to this processing power Ubisoft Montreal employed a team of programmers “that were not scared by complexity and had a large console programming experience to work on the initial PS3 R&D of Dunia (Far Cry 2’s graphics engine)”.

The R&D revealed some pleasant surprises, as Guay explained: “One thing that we realized pretty quickly as we started R&D on PS3, was that the hardware architecture had a very nice fit with some of our technical design decisions. We were positively surprised by how efficient the SPUs (the Cell processing units) were to do such things as run our vegetation simulation, our animations or our physics systems.”

Guay also expressed how impressed he has been with Blu-ray and the PS3’s hard drive, noting: “The hard drive and Blu-ray are making our life easy considering FC2 is an open world continuously streamed around the player. That streaming bandwidth and disk space is very appreciated.”

PS3 gamers won’t be getting a top-end PC port of Far Cry 2, but it will certainly come close, Guay revealing that the most notable differences will come in the lower resolution assets. However, he says this is “not a big deal”.

Far Cry 2 is currently in development for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, with a release currently pencilled in for the financial year beginning April 2008.