PS4 developers will get more creative with the hardware by "year three or year four," says Cerny

PS4 lead architect Mark Cerny feels developers will get more creative with the console's hardware once studios get a few games released on it.

Speaking with Polygon at gamescom, Cerny said this should be rather easy for developers considering PS4 has 10 times the performance power of PS3.

"We set our target at 10 times the PlayStation 3's performance, because that's what we felt we needed to achieve in order to differentiate the titles," Cerny said. "It's a supercharged PC architecture, so you can use it as if it were a PC with unified memory. Much of what we're seeing with the launch titles is that usage; it's very, very quick to get up to speed if that's how you use it. But at the same time, then you're not taking advantage of all the customization that we did in the GPU.

"I think that really will play into the graphical quality and the level of interaction in the worlds in, say, year three or year four of the console."

Cerny said when he pitched the console to developers, he talked about something he calls the "Akihabara test"

"Akihabara is a electronics district in Tokyo, it's just full of stores where you can buy just about anything you plug into a wall socket. I knew that at some point, there'd be out on the sidewalk a PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, and they might even be showing the same game, and the PlayStation 4 had to be powerful enough that when people walked by, they had to look at the PlayStation 4 and say, 'Wow, I have to have that.'

"Believe it or not, at the PlayStation 3 launch, I was hearing a lot about how PlayStation 3 graphics aren't really different from PlayStation 2. I think that speaks to both how large people's expectations are, and also how launch titles are not fully exploiting the hardware."

PS4 is out this November in North America and Europe.