Naughty Dog set the graphical standard for PS3 games when they released Uncharted: Drakes Fortune nearly 2 years ago, and the veteran developer is going to be pushing the PS3 even harder with the sequel later this hard.  Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells let the dogs out on just how they plan on doing that in a recent interview with GameReactor.

"After we shipped Uncharted: Drake's Fortune we gave our programmers some time to freely explore any aspect of our engine or the hardware that they were interested in," Wells revealed.  "We've been able to squeeze out a lot more of the power out of the Playstation 3, by optimizing our SPU code and parceling out more jobs to the SPUs in general."

With the Naughty Dog Engine 2.0, the programmers behind the game can "do more, do it better and do it faster".  This allows for more polygons on screen at once, not only allowing for more characters on screen at once, but also more detailed models as well.  Uncharted 2 also features a more dynamic lighting system.

Naughty Dog's crowning achievement for Uncharted 2, however, is the game's snow.  "If Naughty Dog is going to do snow, it's got to be the best snow that you've ever seen in a videogame! So we've added shaders for ice, frost and snow that include simulated sub-surface scattering, to really capture the subtle way that light scatters through frozen water."

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is due out this fall, exclusively for the PS3.