During a presentation at the Games Developer Conference 05 in March 2005, Sony told developers that the new Playstation 3 will use familiar tools to harness the power of the new PS3 architecture. Apparently, Sony will provide programming tools and interfaces to the hardware that most developers are familiar with from other platforms.

Most of the hardware is accessible with functions similar to the standard OpenGL library, and high-level graphics programming is made possible with “Cg”, a special graphics language created by nVidia, the makers of the PS3 graphics hardware.

The initiative to create a developer-friendly programming environment for the PS3 is largely based on Sony’s experience with the release of the Playstation 2. When the PS2 came out, developers had a hard time learning how to program the console, and often reported to Sony that they found the PS2 harder to program than other video game consoles on the market at that time. The consequence was a slow initial release of Playstation 2 games as developers struggled to come to terms with the new hardware.

Over the life cycle of the Playstation 2, Sony has consistently released new developer tools for the PS2 that would make harnessing the power of the hardware easier. With the Playstation 3, Sony is opting for a programming environment that has many similarities to existing technologies and platforms, such as the OpenGL library, the XML standard, and programming using high level C/C++ language.