Some in the industry have voiced concern over the difficulty developers could have with Sony's PlayStation 3 because of its advanced, complicated Cell architecture. However, British developer Volatile, which is currently working on the PS3 zombie adventure Possession, recently commented to The Guardian newspaper's game blog that the multi-processor console is not as complicated to write for as some might be led to believe.

In fact, because the PS3 utilizes a trimmed down version of Open GL called Open GL ES, anyone who has programmed for the PC should have little trouble adapting to Sony's next-gen console, explained Volatile's lead PS3 programmer, Lyndon Homewood.

"ES is designed for things like set-top boxes and mobile phones, where you want the fundamental graphics but don't need some of the fringe stuff that Open GL has. Because you've got that on PS3, it's going to be much easier than the PS2 to get something up and running - there are hundreds of books out there for it, so you can do your background reading. All the documentation is there," he said.

Homewood also praised the use of Cg, a modified version of the C programming language which should make working with vertex shaders and pixel shaders much easier and should enable developers to more quickly get big results from the GPU.

"All of this is already available and won't be a massive leap from what you're seeing on PCs with high-end graphics cards. But obviously on PS3, you've got eight chips to spread the processing cost over - the main PowerPC chip and seven SPE chips. In a PC, there's just one CPU, two in a dual processor machine. Having an eight CPU multi-processor system in your living room is pretty flash," said Homewood. "At the end of the day it's just a multi-processor architecture. If you can get something running on eight threads of a PC CPU, you can get it running on eight processors on a PS3 - it's not massively different."

Homewood does point to one drawback, however. Apparently the main processor can access all of the PS3's video memory but the seven SPE processors only have access to their own 256K of onboard memory; this means that certain processes would have to be streamed through a small amount of memory. This is not a problem on the Xbox 360.

The Volatile programmer also predicted the graphical level that PS3 gamers will experience. "The graphics capabilities of PS3 will, I think, be slightly above the absolutely top-end graphics cards on the PC, but you've got much more processing power in the box so you're going to see a lot more physics, a lot more generated geometry," he said. "With water ripples, for example - they're pretty much algorithms, you have a flat plane of triangles and you run some sort of mathematical algorithm over it to generate a surface rippling effect - well, you will have the processing power to do these sorts of generated geometry effects On PS3. You could actually put one chip aside just to do that..."

While these comments are certainly encouraging, it's important to keep in mind that they are just one developer's account. Others may not be as pleased as Homewood with the PS3's "ease" of development.