There’s two sides to console improvement. There’s the software program certification facet, which is what you requested about – all the cert necessities and fixing console-specific and certification bugs like utilizing the correct glyphs, utilizing the copyrighted phrases, and so forth. The opposite facet is definitely establishing the software program on the engine degree to interface with the {hardware} drivers and make the most of the sport {hardware}. This tends to be the actually crunchy programming work accomplished by senior software program engineers who actually love taking part in with {hardware}.
All software program must work together with the precise {hardware} sooner or later – there have to be information despatched to the {hardware} and the {hardware} has to function on these information. There are sometimes many layers of abstraction between the {hardware} and the software program – most programmers don’t want to consider how the maths is completed, solely that the maths is completed. It’s the specialists who work with the {hardware} that do what they’ll to squeeze further efficiency out of that {hardware} within the time they’ve allotted to take action.
One such instance can be again within the PS3 days. The PS3 famously had a bunch of “synergistic processing models” (SPUs) that would do a bunch of math in a short time, however required a particular half-float format to function. Most sport dev groups didn’t hassle to make the most of these SPUs for that motive – it took a whole lot of further effort to arrange the software program to retailer information in that format, ship them to the SPUs for calculation, after which convert these information again to the traditional floating level precision numbers we often use. Some groups like Naughty Canine’s Uncharted staff, nevertheless, took full benefit of the SPUs and used them for the post-processing results to make Uncharted 2 look so good.
That is the opposite facet of console improvement – writing code to benefit from the precise {hardware} bells and whistles and squeezing out higher visuals and efficiency from the {hardware} that’s ready for use.
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