Polyphony over-specced Gran Turismo Sport for future 8K consoles
https://www.finder.com.au/gran-turismo-8k-playstation-5
As I write this, I am sitting in the opulent lobby of developer Polyphony Digital’s Tokyo headquarters. I’ve just enjoyed a lengthy, in-depth studio tour, an interview with Kazunori Yamauchi
and a tonne of hours playing the game. It’s due out on October 13 as a
PlayStation 4 exclusive and it’s a lot of fun. Over the coming week, I will be passing a heap of new information your way, including this interesting tidbit about the scale of rendering the art team is doing.
During the studio tour, Kazunori Yamauchi took us from desk to desk, showing his staff beavering away on the game and the insane amount of detail the team goes to make the experience authentic. It’s really quite insane.
At one particular desk, he zoomed right in on the wheel of a car to show the small-type – like the PSI – was in place and legible. A ridiculous detail given you’ll never notice at 300km/h flying down from the heights of Mount Panorama. Then he said the following:
"It takes six months to create a single car. It’s over-specced for PS4 Pro. So we are building for future versions of the console rather than the one we see today".
Intrigued by the suggestion that Gran Turismo Sport is being built to work on a theoretical PlayStation 5, whenever it might eventuate, during our one-on-one I asked Kazunori Yamauchi to clarify that comment. He replied, “I think it would be no problem to run it at 8K even.”
I’m not sure if it is standard practice for developers to create assets so over the specification of the current format as Polyphony Digital is with Gran Turismo Sport. However, I do find it intriguing that Kazunori Yamauchi would openly reference a future console and that Gran Turismo Sport is being built in a way that it can naturally exist in an 8K environment. Is he referring to a hypothetical PS5? Is he referring to a PS5 he knows exists and is targeting 8K? Does he know of a PS4 Super Pro (or something) coming out in the near future?
Adding further intrigue is Kazunori Yamauchi reveal in May 2016 that Gran Turismo 6 was the last of the first generation of games in the series and that Gran Turismo Sport is the first of the next generation. Perhaps Gran Turismo Sport is in for the long haul.