PlayStation 4 Gets Middleware Support From Geomerics

Hey, remember Geomerics? You know, the company behind high-end lighting solutions for some of the biggest games on the market? They've worked on lighting mechanics for games like Medal of Honor, Need for Speed: The Run and the Frosbite 2.0 powered Battlefield 3. Well, today they've announced that their middleware suite will be available to developers working on PS4 titles.

Co-founder Dr. Chris Doran talked briefly about the possibilities of Geomerics' Enlighten technology for next-gen consoles, mentioning that...

Enlighten already runs on current generation hardware. So you can imagine that on next generation hardware Enlighten runs without touching the sides! We have already proved this out in our GPU implementation, developed in collaboration with NVIDIA, which is an order of magnitude faster than current consoles.

So then the question is: what can developers do with all this extra power? With Enlighten there are a number of ways we expect to see the quality bar lifted. The first is the simplest one: the resolution will be cranked up, giving even more fidelity in the lighting. In addition, new runtime technologies make ever greater levels of dynamism possible on new hardware. Dynamic objects (such as vehicles or characters) will interact with all aspects of lighting, and we will see even greater levels of destruction (and indeed creation).

Some of you might remember a while back that we asked about the possibility of next-gen consoles reaching the lighting and shadow fidelity of James Cameron's Avatar, in which Doran's response caused quite a stir.

Nevertheless, the PS4 is being made very developer friendly and Sony has made it their goal to incorporate as many easy-access-doors to the PS4's hardware to enable developers to bring to life their projects with far less constraints than this current-generation of console gaming.

You can see Geomerics' Enlighten engine working out and flexing muscle in the upcoming Dragon Age 3. For more information feel free to visit the Official Website.