Just in case you were worried that BioShock Infinite might be given the same treatement as the original BioShock, first coming to PC and 360, followed by a weak, outsourced port for PS3, you can now lay those fears to rest. Irrational Games’ technical director Chris Kline spoke out in response to a recent inquiry on the company’s community forums, explaining that Infinite will be developed equally and simultaneously on all platforms.
Said Kline:
To answer your question, we have no plans to hand off the PS3 version of BioShock Infinite to another studio. In fact, it’s not a "port" at all. We have a much larger team than we did on the original BioShock, so we’re doing simultaneous in-house development on the PS3, 360, and PC versions of the game.
We all know that the PS3 is powerful but unique console with its own strengths and challenges. But compared to the PC, the Xbox 360 is challenging too. So instead of declaring a "lead platform" and porting the game to the others, we’ve instead changed the game engine so that all platforms look (to a programmer) more like a PS3. This means implementing a task-oriented task processor that assumes a NUMA (non-uniform memory access) design that mimics the PPU/SPU split of the PS3. Writing code this way is more difficult for us, but has a key advantage: it’s both optimal for the PS3 *and* gives speed improvements on other platforms due to increased cache coherence and more efficient use of multiple processing units.
He goes on to explain how this NUMA design aids in the rendering of lighting, as an example of the speed improvements mentioned above, and also notes the feedback programmers will be receiving based on changes to code during the development process.
From what Mr. Kline has tosay on the subject,it looks like PS3 owners can rest easily.
