The power of the PlayStation 3 is still going largely untapped, according to developer Naughty Dog, who reckon their lovely-looking Uncharted: Drake's Fortune used less than half the console's power.

Naughty Dog's elite programmers have however been working on a new toolset for the console called Edge, and they will share this with other developers as game makers look to make the most of the next-generation system.

"These guys are really old-school programmers: guys who are always looking to shave another cycle off an operation. And part of the skill of developing for the PlayStation 3 is getting the GPU to farm jobs out to the six SPUs - seeing which SPUs are idling and can take up some of the slack in a frame-to-frame kind of way," explained Naughty Dog's Richard Lemarchand, talking about the team working on Edge.

He continued: "That's why we think we're probably only using 30 or 40 per cent of the power of the right now, and there's this great, untapped potential.

"All third-party developers can get the Edge libraries for free and are going to be able to use them in their own ways, to get more and more and more out of the PS3 over the years."

So, we should start seeing just how far the PS3 can be pushed in the future.

By Luke Guttridge