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The challenge of remastering Uncharted

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  • The challenge of remastering Uncharted

    On the face of it, the notion of bringing the entire Uncharted trilogy from PS3 to PS4 - with 1080p60 upgrades to boot - should be relatively simple. After all, PlayStation 4 represents a generational leap in system capabilities, particularly in terms of raw GPU power. However, Naughty Dog's recent GDC talk - "Parallelising the Naughty Dog engine using fibres" - reveals in stark detail how difficult it was to bring The Last of Us across to the new Sony console. Indeed, the initial porting work for the game resulted in a sub-optimal experience operating at less than 10fps.
    In many ways, the scale of the challenge with the upcoming Nathan Drake Collection is even more daunting. Three games are in development, not just one, and the original developer itself isn't carrying out the conversion work - instead, Austin-based studio Bluepoint Games is taking the conn. Adding to the difficulty factor, Sony has dropped hints that the three remasters will actually see tangible improvements over the original versions in the form of "better lighting, textures and models", along with a photo mode, plus other enhancements suggested by the community. Just about the only concession is the somewhat disappointing news that the multiplayer components of Uncharted 2 and its sequel will be removed.
    Regardless, The Nathan Drake Collection is a highly ambitious project - and the evidence suggests that the efforts Naughty Dog made into bringing The Last of Us onto PlayStation 4 form the technological foundation on which the remasters are based. So how did the studio turn that initial 10fps port into the slick, 60fps release we enjoyed last year? Based on Naughty Dog's GDC presentation, it seems that the developer was more limited by the CPU, rather than the GPU. The studio leveraged the PS3's Cell chip extensively, in particular the six available SPU satellite processors. The original engine targeted a 30fps update, based on a single processing thread consisting of game logic followed by a command buffer set-up (basically generating the instructions for the GPU). Most of the engine systems were hived off to the SPUs, with the main processor - Cell's PPU - running the majority of the actual gameplay code.
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