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Game Engine Designer (Hazel, Frostbite) breaks down Road to PS5 Cerny presentation

nib95

nib95

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Oct 28, 2017
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You may remember I made a previous thread about this developers breakdown of the Unreal 5 demo, which was arguably the most informative I'd watched.

This is Part 1 of his breakdown of the Mark Cerny Road to PS5 Presentation video, and yet again it is not only explained in very accessible layman's terms, but still remains fairly technical. It's also nice to get insight into a developers perspective.

This first part focuses mostly on SSD's, the bottlenecks they remove, and the design freedom they offer. This isn't necessarily just PS5 specific either, so the benefits discussed should by in large apply to Xbox Series X too.

I'll update the thread/OP when Part 2 drops.




Edit: Part 2 is up. Better than the first imo, shares a lot of similar sentiment we've heard from other devs etc too.



Pottuvoi said:
Part 3 is up.

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Here's the previous thread on his Unreal 5 demo breakdown.
Game Engine Designer (Hazel, Frostbite) breaks down Unreal 5 demo
 
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Naga

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Sorry for nitpicking, but like the previous thread, I don't get why you rename that to "engine designer" when it's "developer". Engine designers aren't really a thing.
 
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nib95

nib95

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Naga said:
Sorry for nitpicking, but like the previous thread, I don't get why you rename that to "engine designer" when it's "developer". Engine designers aren't really a thing.
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I believe that's what he referred to himself as in the previous video, so I was just trying to stay true his own description.
 
Rodelero

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Naga said:
Sorry for nitpicking, but like the previous thread, I don't get why you rename that to "engine designer" when it's "developer". Engine designers aren't really a thing.
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Eh... I dunno. Engine designer is a slightly unusual term, but it's not remotely unusual to have job titles differentiating between developers that work on engine, on gameplay, on audio, on UI/UX/frontend et cetera. There's definitely a big difference between what I'd expect someone that worked on the engine and an average developer.
 
Arttemis

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Fascinating to watch developers directly commenting on these new tool sets and hardware features.
 
Lionheart

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Man this makes me so excited for next gen. Question for this part of the video:

qmk4umo.png


Is this level design this way solely to compensate for slow HDDs or is it not also about rendering power? Just because you can stream in infinite assets you still need to render all them. So I'm wondering where the line is drawn.
 

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Lionheart said:
Man this makes me so excited for next gen. Question for this part of the video:

qmk4umo.png


Is this level design this way solely to compensate for slow HDDs or is it not also about rendering power? Just because you can stream in infinite assets you still need to render all them. So I'm wondering where the line is drawn.
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Yeah this is something i'm curious about as well. Games like WoW and Minecraft allow you to pump up your draw distance massively, but it's going to tank your framerate since that taxes your system much more. How does that differ from what they talk about here? Like, what's the difference between having a higher draw distance and that castle example?
 
Micerider

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Tharp said:
Yeah this is something i'm curious about as well. Games like WoW and Minecraft allow you to pump up your draw distance massively, but it's going to tank your framerate since that taxes your system much more. How does that differ from what they talk about here? Like, what's the difference between having a higher draw distance and that castle example?
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The draw distances options on PC are usually more relative to the number of draw calls your CPU/GPU combo can do and the GPU performance to calculate geometry/shadding etc... The streaming of assets comes second, because the game is usually designed for the lowest common denominator (HDD) and all datas needed for the next 30s of gameplay are already in RAM (but so, RAM size and speed helps too).

Here, the idea change, you don't have to load the RAM with data that are un-used (as your gameplay horizon is 1-2s) and you can therefore use it to pack it with much (much) higher quality assets for those 1-2s. It will also make it easier to draw varied-quality assets further away, but not for the same reason.
 
JasoNsider

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Lionheart said:
Man this makes me so excited for next gen. Question for this part of the video:

qmk4umo.png


Is this level design this way solely to compensate for slow HDDs or is it not also about rendering power? Just because you can stream in infinite assets you still need to render all them. So I'm wondering where the line is drawn.
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It could be either or both. Breath of the Wild, for instance, shows an entire world in front of you and it runs off a handheld. The trick being that they have aggressive LOD implementations (and built an incredibly efficient engine by the looks of things). I think it's safe to say that rendering isn't as much of a bottleneck now. We just need to get high quality stuff off the drive fast enough and hiding it was the best way to do so.
 
Rodelero

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Lionheart said:
Man this makes me so excited for next gen. Question for this part of the video:

Is this level design this way solely to compensate for slow HDDs or is it not also about rendering power? Just because you can stream in infinite assets you still need to render all them. So I'm wondering where the line is drawn.
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You don't need to render them all. There are lots of different techniques used to ensure you don't render things for no reason - a few major examples:

Frustum culling prevents you from rendering things that are off screen.
Occlusion culling prevents you from rendering things that are behind near objects.
Level of detail techniques are used to reduce the amount of data used to render models & textures that are far away
At a lower level back-face culling prevents you from rendering triangles on the far-side of solid objects.
At a lower level style early z-testing is used to prevent you from processing a pixel that is obscured by another.

Beyond that, don't assume that frames where you're rendering lotsa stuff are necessarily more expensive than frames where you're rendering less. Rendering certain things is more expensive than others, so you can easily create situations where you aren't dealing with that many triangles/textures but the framerate suffers because you're spending a lot of time rendering something expensive (hair is quite a good example). It's not necessarily the case that the frames where you're masking loading are going to be cheap just because you're not rendering much stuff. In a game like Fallen Order for example those masked-loading sections where Cal and BB-8 are edging through gaps might be quite expensive because you get so closer to Cal and BB-8 who are almost certainly more expensive to render than distant environment.

So yes, that kind of level design is almost entirely because of the speed of transferring from disk to RAM.
 
Net_Wrecker

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Serious blueballs considering he stopped right where it gets interesting in a presentation that's cleanly split into 3 distinct sections.

But this is valuable watching for a consumer base who have almost no real understanding of how games are made.
 
Fisty

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Good to hear more dev insights, and am happy to see more evidence to disprove the "it just loads faster" narrative around SSDs
 
panda-zebra

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Nice, have been looking forward to part two since th moment the first video ended with an overheating camera :) Can stop F5ing his channel now.
 
EagleClaw

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Wait....

youtu.be

GAME ENGINE DEVELOPER Reacts to ROAD TO PS5 (Part 2)

Follow me on Instagram â–ş https://instagram.com/thechernoMerch â–ş https://chernothreads.comPatreon â–ş https://patreon.com/thechernoThe Road to PS5 â–ş https://you...
youtu.be youtu.be

Did the lead designer of the PS5 say that the PS4/PS4pro function is in the hardware, and once BC is in the console it is in?
Did he also say that a selected range of PS4/PS4pro games will run in a mode with PS5 higher clockrates?

WOW
;-)
 
Gvon

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Sems4arsenal said:
That guy really explains a lot of things eloquently.

Just noticed something -- Mark mentions a game that uses Ray traced reflections in dynamic scenes with moderate performance cost.

I wonder if it's GT7.
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There was a presentation a while back
with GT and Raytracing.



It starts around 7m 30.

Im thinking he's talking about zero dawn 2 and parts of the machines using reflections.
 
Sems4arsenal

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Gvon said:
There was a presentation a while back
with GT and Raytracing.



It starts around 7m 30.

Im thinking he's talking about zero dawn 2 and parts of the machines using reflections.
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That's why I think it is GT7.

I don't think they'll use RT lighting (not yet anyway) when their rasterized solution is the best out there.
 
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nib95

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Part 2 is up. Better than the first imo, shares a lot of similar sentiment we've heard from other devs etc too.

 
Ploid 6.0

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Been listening to this for a while. Had to pause and take a long break for other reasons, it's so interesting watching him explain and react to this stuff. Just got to the part where he said he hated people depending on teraflops. I'm going to start ignoring them on my GPU purchases, even MHz don't really mean much between AMD and Nvidia because they measure differently. Also between generations of the same brand card iirc due to new architecture (Tesla, Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, Turing?, Ampere?).
 
monmagman

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When you spend too much time on this forum you can forget what it's like to listen to someone who actually knows what they are talking about.....these have been great.
 
Afrikan

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Watched this earlier, and it was great! And of course, even though this one was 33 mins, it ends in too early! lol. But at least he says he's going to release the last part in a few days and not a week later. Probably to get it in before Sony's presentation.

I feel I have learned alot in the past month about console and game development, but I don't know what to do with this new information lol. Just cool to know I guess.
 
Chettlar

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part 2 is definitely even better than part 1, but ahh now I have to wait for part 3. Interested to hear his thoughts on the upcoming stuff.

So far lots of echoing a lot of other devs' excitement, which is nice.
 
CatAssTrophy

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watched these today. it was cool hearing him stop and talk about each of the points and break down what devs deal with and what the PS5 solves for those.

was interesting to hear him agreeing that 36 CU's are easier to utilize than 52, and that TF comparisons need to go away.
 
Ravage

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I thought there was another thread on this yesterday. But yes, this is great and i love how part 3 will be out before the 4 Jun reveal.

edit: cross posting from the other thread
I had intended to just check out a couple of minutes but ended up watching the entirety of part 1 and 2, plus his UE5 video. Amazing stuff, i really like his open-minded approach to analysing stuff. Of course, it helps that he knows his stuff well.
 
DangerMouse

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Oh man, that was quick!

CatAssTrophy said:
watched these today. it was cool hearing him stop and talk about each of the points and break down what devs deal with and what the PS5 solves for those.

was interesting to hear him agreeing that 36 CU's are easier to utilize than 52, and that TF comparisons need to go away.
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Yeah, I really like him pausing to break down each individual item and address what each solution is trying to provide for devs.

And the unexpected amount of extra I/O and audio hardware they've added for addressing gaming-specific processing bottlenecks was one of the key things he highlighted when he got to those parts of Cerny's presentation in part 2 and 3, which lines up with obviously why Cerny stressed them so much and why dev after dev, day after day, keep coming out and praising it and the sheer speed at which it can move data around, if it works as proposed, thanks to the custom I/O, super fast SSD, and custom SSD controller combination.
 
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Pottuvoi said:
Part 3 is up.

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These are good videos

I was waiting to hear his take on the overclocking. And as I thought, until we all get to have a PS5 in our house we won't be able to comment about downclocking and overheating. You can't just say it's guaranteed to have major issues because it isn't out. That said I'm still of the mind that consoles should be developed to be steady and cool and not pushed to the limit.

I'm sure they will work with what's available and provide beautiful content that will leave our jaws on the floor. Excited for next gen.
 
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