In terms of pure game mechanics, the premise of thatgamecompany’s Flower is fairly straightforward: players control a group of pedals and float around while aiming to touch other flowers on an open field. However, the underlying graphics engine is anything but simple. According to company co-founder and president Kellee Santiago, Flower leverages the many SPEs in PS3 to render 200,000 blades of grass on-screen – simultaneously. It’s a computational-heavy programming feat only made possible on PS3:

An artist friend of ours came to us, really hoping that we could tell him some clever trick that we used to make it look like we had so many blades of grass. He was reluctant to believe that really John Edwards just made it happen on the SPUs.

“It really would be impossible to make it look the same on any other system.

Good to know something is putting all those CPU cores to use.

PS3 Flower’s grass impossible on other systems [GameZine]

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