Mark Cerny, the man behind the upcoming PlayStation 4, also had a lead role in the development of Playstation VITA.
According to a recent article by Digital Foundry, it was revealed that Mark Cerny had the same role in PlayStation VITA development as he had for PlayStation 4. It was earlier rumored that both PlayStation VITA and PlayStation 4 were developed simultaneously by the same team.
At Gamescom, Digital Foundry got a chance to talk with Shuhei Yoshida regarding this rumor and he confirmed that Cerny indeed had a critical role in PlayStation VITA development.
“Yes, he worked on it,” the Sony Worldwide Studios boss replied. “I don’t think we called him a chief system architect for the Vita, but he was heavily involved in the core development of the Vita.”
Digital Foundry had a chance to meet with Mark Cerny at Tokyo Game Show in Japan and they approached him regarding this topic. Mark Cerny confirmed that he indeed had the same role in PlayStation VITA’s development as he had for PlayStation 4.
Both the PlayStation VITA and PlayStation 4 are based on off-shelf parts of already available hardware. But that’s not the only thing powering them, both of them have their own hardware customizations that elevates them above similar powered machines.
Digital Foundry had a look at VITA hardware and found customizations like an enhanced Samsung memory manager offering up to 12.8GB/s of bandwidth along with customizations to the PowerVR GPU included on the SoC (System on Chip).
There is also a interesting new tidbit about how both the PlayStation VITA and PlayStation 4 were planned from beginning to be working together in some way. Mark Cerny explained to Digital Foundry how he and Shuhei Yoshida came up with this concept.
“That was definitely always a goal, the question was how could we accomplish that? [It was stumbling upon the idea of] Remote Play when we realised we could use that to tie it all together and create a family-friendly strength for PlayStation 4. We had to,” Cerny recalled.
“Shuhei Yoshida and I ended up both pitching that feature on the same day. It was an amazing coincidence. We had both come to the same conclusions that the affinity for the two platforms to work together was so large that it just made sense.”
PlayStation VITA has really shown it’s graphical superiority in mobile hardware with games like Killzone: Mercenary and Uncharted: Golden Abyss. It goes on to show that even if you use off-shelf parts that become weaker with time, with hardware customizations and APIs giving full access to the hardware, you can really utilize the best potential out of the hardware that certainly won’t be possible for any other similar spec devices. We can look forward to seeing the same on PlayStation 4.
