Resogun PS4 developer Housemarque has discussed the shooter’s technical nature, and has confirmed that it offloads much of the visual calculations to the console’s GPU, leaving the CPU free to focus on handling gameplay.
Speaking with Polygon at the event, lead programmer Harry Krueger explained that to ensure the game’s “tens of thousands” of particles could flow smoothly, the team applied the behavioural effect calculations to the PS4′s GPU.
He added, “Basically, most of the cubes, the individual voxels, all of that stuff is basically done on the GPU, and that offloads a tremendous workload off the CPU that’s left to just focus on gameplay.”
Sony touched on this capability earlier this year, stating that the PS4′s 18 compute units would be capable of sharing workload in this manner. Krueger added, “At Housemarque, we’ve always been a very technically proficient company because we have a lot of people from the demo scene. A lot of people just naturally like tinkering with this kind of stuff, you know? So, it just came naturally that we just started looking at GPU compute and using it as much as possible in order to get all this stuff happening.
“If we had to do all of that on the CPU, the game would still kind of be a similar experience, but it would have a lot less of this going on. It would be a lot less dynamic, a lot less fluid. Basically, the experience would not be the same.”
