Frostbite Tech Director: “PS4 C++ Toolchain Is Superb;” SMAA T2X Attempted On PS4 BF4 but Was too Costly

Frostbite Tech Director: “PS4 C++ Toolchain Is Superb;” SMAA T2X Attempted On PS4 BF4 but Was too Costly

Giuseppe Nelva April 7, 2014 5:57 AM EST

Frostbite Technical Director Johan Andersson had words of praise to share recently for the toolchain available to PS4 developers to compile their code and more, defining it “superb” in a conversation wit SN Systems Optimizer Team Leader Greg Bedwell, that is working on it on behalf of Sony.

Great to contribute back, the PS4 C++ toolchain is superb!

Bedwell himself mentioned that tomorrow there will be a conference on the topic titled “PlayStation 4 CPU Toolchain: Launch Post-mortem” at the 2014 European LLVM Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Andersson also shared an interesting tidbit of detail on the development of the PS4 version of Battlefield 4, mentioning that the team attempted to implement SMAA T2X (Enhanced Subpixel Morphological Anti-aliasing), but the feature was found too costly for the game on the system.

We tried SMAA T2X and looks nice but cost was too high for BF4.

To give you a better idea of what we’re talking about, SMAA T2X is the same anti-aliasing technique used with excellent results by Sucker Punch on InFAMOUS: Second Son. It’s unsurprising that it looked nice on Battlefield 4 as well, but unfortunately game development on console is a game of trade-off, so DICE had to make do with the less performing FXAA.

