We can only really begin to cover the basics in this presentation (the lighting techniques in themselves are immensely complex) - there's a sense that Guerrilla is striking out into unknown territory to a certain extent and surprising itself with the results from the learning process. The overall takeaway we have here is that next-gen development is very much in the early stages, and as impressive as it is, the Killzone: Shadow Fall demo is still very much work-in-progress stuff and we should expect plenty of improvement for the final game. The team itself is clearly very happy with the ease of development for PlayStation 4, and has identified jobs-based parallelism as the best way to get the most from the multi-core architecture, while the GPU is considered to be very fast, but shader optimisation seems to be the key to getting the most out of it.
What is very interesting is that the developer says that the GDDR5 memory really gives the system "its wings", and lauds the immense 176GB/s of bandwidth available. However, it's not a bottomless pit of unlimited throughput - efforts still need to be made to use small pixel formats in order to maximise performance. Bearing in mind that the vast, unified memory pool of high-bandwidth RAM is one of the key advantages PS4 has over PC and the next-gen Xbox, it'll be interesting to see how multi-platform projects cope.
Also fascinating is that by its own admission Guerrilla is not using much of the Compute functionality of the PS4 graphics core - in its conclusion to the presentation it says that there's only one Compute job in the demo, and that's used for memory defragmentation. Factoring in how much Sony championed the technology in its PS4 reveal, it's an interesting state of affairs and perhaps demonstrates just how far we have to go in getting the most out of this technology - despite its many similarities with existing PC hardware.
