Yesterday, Digital Foundry posted its tech review for the PC port of erstwhile PlayStation exclusive God of War, concluding that the work delivered by Sony Santa Monica and Jetpack Interactive was simply superb. In addition to delivering an excellent conversion of the core content, the team has gone several steps further. Yes, the prerequisites of high frame-rate and ultrawide display support are in, but it’s also great to see Sony’s ports embracing worthwhile technologies such as Nvidia DLSS and Reflex, in addition to AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution – while integrating its own temporal upscaler.
After receiving review code pre-Christmas, Sony approached us asking whether we’d like to speak to the developers about the game and we eagerly took up the opportunity! In this tech interview, you’ll find out what the goals of Sony Santa Monica and Jetpack Interactive were, why the choice was made to use the older DirectX 11 API as its foundation (other first-party Sony ports have favoured DX12), and how the team converted a game based on a single platform with a unified memory subsystem to the split pools used on PC.
In this interview, edited for length and clarity, we talk with Matt DeWald, senior manager for technical production at Sony Santa Monica, and Steve Tolin, a lead from Jetpack Interactive.
Digital Foundry: When did the porting process begin? And who is working on it, Sony Santa Monica, as well as Jetpack?
Matt DeWald: So, we’ve actually been working on this for a while, but it started kind of slow to begin with. It just started as like, “Hey, can we even do this? Do we have the technical expertise? How do we work together? blah, blah, blah.” So, there’s a lot of interstitial work that needs to happen just to figure that out. It’s probably been about two years of total work, but with a very small crew – there’s a team of four at Jetpack that have been doing the primary engineering efforts. And they’re almost all engineering efforts, there’s been a little bit of assistance from internal, just where things are, “Hey, how does this work? Where is this thing placed?” and then internal Santa Monica, myself leading the project from a production standpoint, but then mostly, it’s just QA support, and then tapping different individuals to help fix bugs that may have existed on PC. So, it’s a very small team that we’ve tried to produce this with. Keep it lean and mean.
Digital Foundry: What were the specific project goals as the project started?
Matt DeWald: The ultimate project goal was to get a well-performing version of God of War on PC. The key was to make sure that we had a good PC game, right? You could just take it over from console, put it on PC, and just leave it at that without making any updates, but we did want to make sure that we improved the game as much as we could, without, you know, rewriting underlying systems and rebuilding the engine from scratch.