Epic Games, the company behind the stunning Unreal Engine 4, is impressed with what Sony has offered developers — in terms of hardware specs — with the PlayStation 4. Speaking to CVG, Epic VP Mark Rein had nothing, but praise for Sony's decision to use "off-the-shelf PC parts" in the PS4.
"It's a smart thing to do. They're going to benefit from it – there won't be that whole 'how do we make this work', there's just going to be 'wow, what can we do with this?' And we'll do great things," Rein said.
"I think it's a very smart move on Sony's behalf to build this sort of enhanced PC architecture and then put so much in it. Let's not forget it has 16 times the memory we had in PlayStation 3 – that's not insignificant. Knowing that every machine has that… we can do crazy, ridiculous stuff with that."
Getting a little more specific, Rein even raised the notion that PS4 titles could even surpass what "most PCs" are capable of achieving due to memory limitations of the 32-bit versions of Windows.
"When you think about Windows, even Windows for most people is tied to about 2GB of addressable memory space. This really opens up beyond what most PCs can do, because most PCs are running a 32-bit versions of Windows."
"It's like giving you the world's best PC. 'We're going to make it super convenient, we're going to make it easy for you to get games on there, we're going to start the games running while you're downloading them and we're going to perform your updates in the background.' You're not going to turn this thing off… you're just going to sleep it and it's going to come back on," he added.
"The kind of stuff that they announced that they're doing, the level of convenience and things like that… they're making a really perfect gaming PC."
