Volition producer sees potential for better graphics on PS3

As developers learn more and more about the Sony PlayStation 3’s hardware, speculations on what possibilities lie ahead are constantly being raised. This time, Red Faction: Guerrilla‘s  (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC) producer was placed on the hot seat and was asked whether he thinks the PS3 can outdo the Xbox 360 graphically. Find out what he had to say after the jump.

Jeff Carroll, associate producer for Volition‘s upcoming third-person shooter Red Faction: Guerrilla (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC), was interviewed recently at THQ‘s Gamer’s Day event and he answered a lot of questions about their project and its host consoles. Among the most interesting parts focused on what he thinks the future holds for graphics on the Sony PlayStation 3.

Carroll describes the PS3 as “a very powerful system underneath” with a lot of memory and processing power for developers to exploit. He also shared his belief that the PS3 has the potential to deliver better graphics than rival Microsoft Xbox 360 in the years to come.

“I think early on people are going to be struggling to figure out exactly how to make the PS3 work”, says Carroll as he relates how his own crew was challenged by the console’s architecture. He then reveals that significant progress has been made thus far with a little more pushing.

“We have been getting the physics system, the Havok system and our own proprietary destruction system running on the SPUs, as well as our animations,” the producer says. “We’re seeing quite a decent speed improvement now that we’ve effectively got that running on the SPUs instead of the CPUs.”

Carroll, however, did not take anything away from the Xbox 360’s advantages. In fact, he praised the platform for its ability to push polygons. He says it works really well for Red Faction: Guerrilla because the game will have almost fully destructible environments which requires exactly that kind of power from a platform.

Red Faction: Guerrilla is slated for release in THQ’s fiscal year 2009. That’s a hefty amount of waiting, but that should be fine because development in both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions by then would be in much better form than it is today.

Via Videogamer