As great as the PlayStation 3 exclusive Uncharted: Drake's Fortune looked when it launched last year, Naughty Dog says the game was only able to harness around 30 to 40 percent of the console's total power. Co-lead designer Richard Lemarchand was interviewed over at ThreeSpeech and he explained what he meant when he made the statement.

Lemarchand said that he believes they barely scratched the surface on the PS3's potential back in Uncharted's development phases. He said a lot of the unraveling should be don on taking advantage of the Cell Processor's cores to get the most out of the system.

"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," he told ThreeSpeech.

"That's why we think we're probably only using 30 or 40 per cent of the power of the PS3 right now, and there's this great, untapped potential," the developer added. "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."

Pretty exciting stuff, eh? Let's hope developers, both first-party and third-party, eventually get to find ways on how to maximize the platform's potential. We know games like Metal Gear Solid 4 and possibly Heavy Rain are trying to do just that, so let's hold our breaths keep wishing for the best.

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