Uncharted 2 Couldn’t Happen on Xbox 360?

From a technical standpoint, Sony’s PlayStation 3 is the most capable game console on the market right now, thanks in part to its robust Cell processor that features seven fast cores – four more than Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Of course, comparisons like these are too simple, but the fact remains, the processing power of the PS3 is incredible, which is one reason things aside from gaming have even found a home there, such as Linux and Folding@home.

Up to this point though, we’ve heard various humors of how certain PS3 exclusive titles simply wouldn’t have been made possible on the Xbox 360, but no developer has ever been too clear-cut about it. It appears that Uncharted 2, the sequel to Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is indeed going to be one of those titles – at least, if Christophe Balestra, the co-president of Naughty Dog (the game’s developer), has something to say about it.

If there’s one reason in particular that couldn’t be debunked, it’s, “we fill the Blu-ray 100 percent, we have no room left on this one. We have 25GB of data; we’re using every single bit of it.” Compare that to the Xbox 360’s discs that hold just about 7GB. This is simply a minor reason, though, as Naughty Dog is planning to take full advantage of the PS3’s hardware, unlike any other game to come before it.

The company will be relying heavily on the multi-core nature of the Cell processor to accelerate both the gameplay elements and animations (and we could assume physics), while they’ll focus the RSX graphics chip on what it does best… graphics. The realism is meant to be top-rate in the upcoming sequel, so much so, that even the audio will be processed off the SPUs on the CPU. What’s the point? No matter where you are in the game, the audio should give you the impression of realism. Picture the ray tracing technique, for example, which calculates reflection and light off of an object based off of available light sources. This audio technique would be somewhat similar.

Either way, the original Uncharted was a fantastic game, so I’m looking forward to seeing if the sequel’s going to be able to live up to all this hype. After all, fancy graphics and effects are one thing, but enjoyable gameplay is something else…

For the first game, Balestra estimated that they used around 30 percent of the power of the SPUs, now the team was able to use them to 100 percent capacity. Naughty Dog understands the Cell processor, and knows how to get it to sing. “The ability to use the RSX [the PS3’s graphics processor] to draw your pixels on the screen, then you use the Cell to do gameplay and animations—we kind of took the step of using the Cell process to help the RSX.