After previously disclosing that Polyphony Digital has been considering development of Gran Turismo on PC platforms, company founder Kazunori Yamauchi has spoken more about the relative difficulties of game development on PC — and on PlayStation.
Naturally, with rumors still swirling following the Nvidia GeForce Now “leak” — where Gran Turismo 7 appeared but not tagged as a game in development for PC — the subject of developing a GT title for PC came up in the questions at a recent round-table interview at the Gran Turismo World Finals in Monaco.
When asked about the comparative difficulties of working with PC or PS5, Yamauchi answered with a familiar comment about hardware volatility: “On a PC, there can be a large variety of hardware that the software has to be compatible with, which makes QA [quality assurance] very difficult,” stated Yamauchi.
That of course compares to the closed-box systems of consoles which remain as a single specification across their life, making the QA process relatively simple even when developing for two generations at once.
Yamauchi continued: “But the PC is a world where the users do a lot of the QA! We had just seen a presentation for a new steering wheel controller here in this room earlier, but it was running on a PC. But it wouldn’t start up, the drivers wouldn’t work, they reinstalled the drivers, etc. The PC is an interesting platform where a lot of responsibility is placed on the user’s side.”
However the difficulties of working on console hardware was also highlighted in a separate response to a question regarding the most difficult part of GT7’s development. As part of his answer, Yamauchi highlighted the challenges of native 4K60 — 4K resolution at 60 frames per second — on console as opposed to PC.
“Running in 4K60 native is a very difficult task. The PS5 only consumes about 300W maximum, power wise, and that is not a small amount, but on a PC you can use 700W or 800W. Achieving 4K60 with just 300W is pretty difficult.”
We’ll have more from the European round-table interview later this week.
See more articles on Interviews, Kazunori Yamauchi, and PC Gaming.
