Agree. The audio and SSD are huge steps forward and deservedly got the biggest portion of the talk.
Look at how many devs have been more excited about the CPU than GPU going into this gen, and I don't remember Cerny saying "Zen" at all.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
PlayStation 5 System Architecture Deep Dive |OT| Secret Agent Cerny
- Thread starter vestan
- Start date
- Status
Look at how many devs have been more excited about the CPU than GPU going into this gen, and I don't remember Cerny saying "Zen" at all.
So know that both systems have their full specs revealed after years of speculating, can both the Playstation 5 and Xbox series X have visuals similar to these demos at say cb4K @ 30fps?
Interesting post on what Tempest could mean for the PS5, well worth a read.
Really looking forward to the audio improvements too but the Series X has dedicated audio hardware too and even if it didnt the audio processing is handled by the CPU not the GPU. Time to finally get an atmos compatible sound system :)
At the end of the day we are not developers, so we don't know how these consoles will benefits developers, some are happy with PS5 and they consider PS5 to be the better console and some consider XSX to be the better console, now both will show us which one has the best content (games).
I can't wait to see what kind of technical feats devs can push with a 3.5GHz 8c/16t CPU.
Ubisofts definetly gonna make an assassin's Creed open world game with so many NPCs in every corner and other open world games are going to be so breathable and full of life.
Plus the destruction, future Battlefeild games and other high action games are going to be nuts.
Listen at 18:55 mark. He says exactly what I've been saying: the PS5 is a return to the architectural design philosophy of having an inline rom-based cartridge system, only for today's modern 3d games. In this context, it is a pretty revolutionary piece of technology because the overall system will have the flexibility to operate via its tremendous throughput in a manner very similar to how games stored on ROM cartridges were effectively an extension of the system 's RAM pool in early cartridge based systems. Only we really haven't seen what possibilities this allows for with modern 3d games.
I'm impressed by the architecture details divulged about the PS5 as well, but it's strange to see people ignore Microsoft having similar solutions in the Series X. Microsoft were talking to developers too and getting input on their machine, not sure why people think they aren't addressing similar issues/constraints. Overall, can't wait to hear more of a detailed breakdown/dive into the bespoke enhancements each system has.
Audio took up nearly 20% of the GPUs power? Damn didn't know that, Cerny really did free up the PS5s GPU to its maximum potential.Interesting post on what Tempest could mean for the PS5, well worth a read.
Separate Audio chips.
Separate RT cores.
Full power on graphics.
Sorry, but this reads like mostly hogwash. The XSX RAM setup is going to be superior in all but a few corner cases, and I refuse to believe audio consumes 20% of a GPU's compute.Interesting post on what Tempest could mean for the PS5, well worth a read.
We don't need to invent magical scenarios where the PS5 is secretly better. It's just awesome in its own right.
That being said, if Sony doesn't support their own LDAC standard for headphones, it will be a god damn crime.
This needs to the said out loud on a megaphone to every gaming forum on the internet.
It doesn't mean that much, but I wouldn't say it doesn't mean anything. It literally represents the most popular thing on YouTube in realtime.
Warning, huge RT info dump.
It very easy to see it in these screenshots (I've taken them from Dictator's wonderful DF videos):
No RT GI, the only light source is the sunlight outside, no light source inside so the insides and the body have some general unified light so they won't be completely dark. It's flat, it's ugly, it has no "depth" and there are no shadows because no direct light source means nothing to shadow from.
Exactly the same scene, now with RT GI. The outside remains the same (it might look a bit brighter because it's darker inside) but the insides look different. Before the RT GI was calculated, the insides were pitch black because the flat global light that was there before is no longer needed. Now rays from the sun hit the ground outside, bounce and light the insides. Under the body, you can see that all the rays that it blocked form a natural shadow that was never there in the first place because there was no rasterized light source to cast it. You can also see that corners have a bit of AO to them, that's because tight areas are less likely to receive bounce lighting so they get darker. So again, natural AO forms that will only get better with more bounces.
Another good example is this one. Another scene with sunlight outside and uniform global light inside that looks very flat.
Now, let's throw in some RT GI. Lighting isn't flat anymore, light bounces from the outside and creates a nice, deep, reach lighting inside with natural AO and shadows. Just look at those red boults and the shadow they cast, beautiful.
Because XSX or the 2080ti can't handle that in a game like Metro, all they do is calculate bounce lighting for sunlight and sunlight alone. So direct light from the sun isn't using RT, a flashlight isn't using RT, etc.. But over time developers will get better at using RT, hardware will become more powerful and wonderful things will happen. Actually my assumption is that PS5 Pro and XSX - X will be RT beasts and will try to push more RT in current PS5 games over resolution. So basically instead of resolution machines that the Pro and X were this generation, in the next-gen the Pro consoles might be RT machines considering going over 4K seems to have a bit of a diminishing return.
It's not baked. I mean, it could be baked, but specifically in Metro it's not baked. Sunlight is calculated in real-time in Metro (it has to, the game has a day/night cycle) but it is just a simple rasterized light. Rasterized light doesn't follow physics, it just illuminates areas it should illuminate according to a function, it doesn't know if something is on the way. Think of it as a stupid painter, it paints light on objects in range without knowing if something is on the way. If there is a sphere and there is a light source on its' left, its' left side will be illuminated and the right side will stay dark. But if there is a box between the sphere and the light? Rasterization lighting doesn't care, the sphere's left side will be in full light. So everything in range of the light gets illuminated, no shadows exist. That's where rasterized shadows come in. They are a completely different effect, detached completely from the lighting model, it's a whole other rasterization effect.
Yes, you can call the RT GI a totally separate process. Rays are shot through every pixel on-screen (I this 4A went with 1rpp in the end) and bounce around, at the end they look for a direct line to the sun. If rays find the sun, the pixel gest bounce light, if it doesn't, it doesn't get the bounce light and remains dark. So shadows are a byproduct of the light, just like real shadows. So what it means is that every light that direct lights something is being faked using rasterization and every shadow resulting from that light is a fake rasterization shadow. But light that bounces from objects, which is only based on sunlight, create additional shadows that don't exist in the RT-less version of the game. After the RT process is done, its' lighting data is added to the original image and help create the final image.
It very easy to see it in these screenshots (I've taken them from Dictator's wonderful DF videos):
No RT GI, the only light source is the sunlight outside, no light source inside so the insides and the body have some general unified light so they won't be completely dark. It's flat, it's ugly, it has no "depth" and there are no shadows because no direct light source means nothing to shadow from.
Exactly the same scene, now with RT GI. The outside remains the same (it might look a bit brighter because it's darker inside) but the insides look different. Before the RT GI was calculated, the insides were pitch black because the flat global light that was there before is no longer needed. Now rays from the sun hit the ground outside, bounce and light the insides. Under the body, you can see that all the rays that it blocked form a natural shadow that was never there in the first place because there was no rasterized light source to cast it. You can also see that corners have a bit of AO to them, that's because tight areas are less likely to receive bounce lighting so they get darker. So again, natural AO forms that will only get better with more bounces.
Another good example is this one. Another scene with sunlight outside and uniform global light inside that looks very flat.
Now, let's throw in some RT GI. Lighting isn't flat anymore, light bounces from the outside and creates a nice, deep, reach lighting inside with natural AO and shadows. Just look at those red boults and the shadow they cast, beautiful.
Yes, it could be done using path tracing but this specific thing I was talking about could also be done using Photon mapping which is unachievable right now because Photon Mapping and BVH structure don't play nice. Photon mapping needs a kd-tree and kd-trees are very hard to build so as long as BVH is the only traversal structure we have, path tracing it is.
RT Gi gives bounce light, bounce light shadows and AO. Bounce light shadows aren't really a thing right now, so they are basically new shadows created as a result of the RT GI so they don't replace anything, they are a pure upgrade. AO will be created but it will change based on how many bounces the RT GI does. IMO what Metro does already looks better than any SSAO out there and when hardware gets more powerful, we will get more bounces which will make the GI look better, the AO looks better and the bounce light shadows to look better.
In a perfect world, every light is emissive and every light bounces multiple times (and on top of that, light does a lot more like reflects, refracts, interacts with atmospheric elements and so on). Minecraft RTX does that, that's the reason it's one of the most intensive RT demos around even though originally Minecraft isn't exactly the highest graphical benchmark. This generation won't be able to handle that outside of games like Minecraft (which runs at 1080p sub-60fps one XSX), but PS6 might and PS7 will for sure.
Because XSX or the 2080ti can't handle that in a game like Metro, all they do is calculate bounce lighting for sunlight and sunlight alone. So direct light from the sun isn't using RT, a flashlight isn't using RT, etc.. But over time developers will get better at using RT, hardware will become more powerful and wonderful things will happen. Actually my assumption is that PS5 Pro and XSX - X will be RT beasts and will try to push more RT in current PS5 games over resolution. So basically instead of resolution machines that the Pro and X were this generation, in the next-gen the Pro consoles might be RT machines considering going over 4K seems to have a bit of a diminishing return.
Rasterization isn't needed for 3D, but it's efficient as hell. Thing is, it's ugly so developers need to come up with more and more rasterization methods to cover up the ugliness or mimic more optical phenomena that accrue naturally with light/RT. Because developers know the real-world lighting targets, the hoops they jump through to hit those targets and how they fail because rasterization just can't simulate light, they worship the idea of RT even if some gamers don't understand its' importance.
No, they are not confined to screen space. But I wouldn't call Metro's solution hybrid, it's a real RT GI solution but it's not a full solution because it only covers the sun and it could use more bounces. What I mean by that is that Metro uses zero rasterization for RT GI, it's pure RT, but the solution doesn't go deep enough because of power limitations. A hybrid solution will be Remedy's Control. Remedy uses a rasterization based GI, but uses RT to fix light leaks.
Metro isn't hybrid and it works just fine in 1440p and 4K. Control's solution is hybrid and it's also just fine in 1440p and 4K. The video you saw was very early work by 4A, they still shot 3 rays per pixel, no one does that today. That's why they were confined to 1080p in that video.
Last edited:
I'm not a tech genius like most people are in this thread, but I just wanted to know with the PS5 having a very fast SSD, does that mean Sony own studies like Santa Monica, for example, would be able to put out games faster throughout next-gen? Or it doesn't work like that?
Do we know if it's possible to make a cooling system that is really REALLY good at cooling one specific power budget but lowers complexity and cost by lacking the ability to adjust to different power and heat loads (which, if I'm reading correctly, the PS5 will not need because it will always be drawing the exact same amount of power)?
I would actually prefer that they went with the approach used in Spider-Man (temporal injection with a dynamic resolution) and standardised that. Use it on every game, with at least 40fps VRR to reduce artifacts.
in 1 sec loading a big large world with various assets etc...
For narrative games it can bring a lot of kojimesque creativity.
It will absolutely make development easier and faster, though I would hope they would use the opportunity to reduce severe crunch rather than get the games out quicker. But yeah, no matter what, devs are going to have an easier time of it in terms of creativity and bug-fixing.
is audio generally that much of a resource hog for the CPU?Interesting post on what Tempest could mean for the PS5, well worth a read.
XSX uses two different compression methods. One is Zlib, for general data, and another is BCPack made specifically for textures (which is the biggest VRAM hog). That's why MS used x2 while Sony didn't, BCPack is much more efficient at compressing textures than Kraken so overall MS had a higher compression ratio.
I'm not talking about compression, 22GB/s will be a unicorn anyway, I'm talking about raw throughput. Will the PS5's SSD be able to hold a fixed 5.5GB/s or is it like the CPU and GPU (and every NVMe ever except the one in the XSX) and it will change under load.
Not if they finally have a thicker API abstraction on PS5. If so, PS6 might be able to finally VM the previous generation. In theory, if they VM the PS5 and the PS5 simulates the PS4, it should be transitive and run 3 generations of games. Thing is, did Sony make the right move and build the API to support that in the future?
Last edited:
I'm okay with that too, great solution and Spiderman image looked clean as hell.
Microsoft DirectX 12 and Graphics Education
Enhanced education for graphics developers. We'll cover topics like Presentation Modes, porting to DirectX 12, Conservative Rasterization, graphics tools, An...
www.youtube.com
Wrong thread?Microsoft DirectX 12 and Graphics Education
Enhanced education for graphics developers. We'll cover topics like Presentation Modes, porting to DirectX 12, Conservative Rasterization, graphics tools, An...
My takeaway seeing the keynote was the same as many other, that PS5, can mimic PS4 and PS4 Pro fine for any PS4 game, it's just that that boost mode which runs the PS4 games at native clock will require testing on game-by-game basis. But, that blog post seem to imply the polar opposite. Amidst all the outrage online and bad press, they still haven't bothered to clarify it. Absolutely appalling PR job by Sony.
BC is huge this gen than any other given the rise of digital and how much money is tied up in many folks account. They cannot afford to not get it right, it'll have a substantial impact on consumers no question.
Could you clarify for me, a question which has been in my mind for past day. Is it possible for PS5 to run both CPU and GPU at its maximum clock at the same time or not? I haven't been quite able to understand the tech behind it.
SoC takes up significant portion of their budget so I'm curious to know how big that die is. Given the amount of custom tech they seem to have incorporated on that thing, it could be as large as Series X SoC. They are definitely saving money on SSD and memory though.
They simply won't have to "overprovision" their cooling setup to deal with unexpected loads and/or deal with the fact that their power draw is driving their cooling system into jet mode. They can dimension it and know exactly how it's going to behave.
It's kinda the inverse of what MS did with the X, that had a very overprovisioned cooling solution to deal with the fact that the APUs varied wildly in power draw.
Direct X is used on PS as well, has stuff to do with features in amd with direct x 12 ultimate
Yes. Just because they're at maximum clock doesn't mean all their execution units are actively working on data at that time. The system relies on them not doing that, actually.
A great example of this is the Furmark benchmark on desktop PCs. People call it a "power virus" because it puts a load on the GPU that's impossible to achieve in real life workloads.
Reddit - Dive into anything
www.reddit.com
Did you now see that anex ?
There is a whole thread on it where he also give out some more info.
By my RDNA1 measurements, 16 CUs are 32mm^2. The larger memory controllers on XSX add another 18mm^2. However, these numbers are almost certainly different for RDNA2. The XSX chip is much smaller than projected from them, and per Mr. Cerny's rough approximations for functional block size is reduced too. There's too much imprecision to get more than ballpark, but I'd put the total variance of 16 CU and 2 PHY at about 40 mm^2 altogether.
But this also means that any extra bespoke hardware for Sony also has higher density/less size. And there's probably less of it than you speculate. The XSX chip itself contains almost 80MB of ESRAM, so I doubt there's even more on PS5. Both consoles also have dedicated I/O hardware onboard. Sony probably has more, but this is unlikely to be a majority contributor to the size. So I wouldn't expect PS5's chip to be quite as big as XSX.
Regardless, you're still right that SOC differences won't be huge, and are unlikely to represent a $100 savings, or near that. But fewer RAM chips and fewer SSD chips will be real savings as well, alongside other cost-saving measures from Sony versus Microsoft. It's certainly not impossible that the two machines will launch at the same price. But it wouldn't be surprising at all to see a $100 MSRP gap either.
Note that neither the presentation nor the blog post say only 100 games will be BC. They say that of the top 100 games, nearly 100 will be BC. No statement is made about whether any of the other 3900+ games are BC.
It was only $100 more for less than 6 months. What actually mattered in the end is mostly that one system was a PlayStation, and the other an Xbox.
Even with absolutely no special approach suggested by PS5, measured purely on paper specs, the gap between it and XSX is less than half the gap between Xbox One and PS4. The gap is so low, that it's not implausible some multiplat games may have literally no visual gap at all comparing machines: same resolution and same settings on both.
Mr. Cerny said "a few percent" drop should be the most you'll see. At 3% lower, PS5 would be 9.97TF. It would take about 8% lower to get PS5 under 9.5 TF.
At half the speed. For many things that may not matter at all, or variation may be continuous and imperceptible. But it seems likely some applications will have a qualitative threshold above Microsoft's performance but below Sony's, resulting in a step-change.
It's all just direct quotes from the video, no new information. They did say there will be a second article where they asked him questions afterward, though.
Cheers for that, I was quite puzzled at first. It didn't help Penello was touting on twitter as if it's one or the other and can't be maxxed at the same time.
Also yes, I do know Furmark, I remember benching my GTX 260 way back in 2009, good times haha.
There hasn't been much talk on cooling in the PS5 yet, and how heat could impact real world sustained throughput of the SSD, especially for expansion drives.
If expansion drives won't require a heatsink, it's going to be interesting to see what the heat dissipation will look like along with the subsequent throughput. NVME SSDs can get pretty damn hot and will throttle, so I can only imagine how hot they could get with sustained use at the speeds Sony wants.
The active cooling for the system is going to need to be superior to what they've done in the past.
If expansion drives won't require a heatsink, it's going to be interesting to see what the heat dissipation will look like along with the subsequent throughput. NVME SSDs can get pretty damn hot and will throttle, so I can only imagine how hot they could get with sustained use at the speeds Sony wants.
The active cooling for the system is going to need to be superior to what they've done in the past.
I'm not sure of the variability of the 5.5 gb/s throughput, but it seems devs are saying that the PS5 i/o and ssd solution is much more thoroughly embedded and integrated than the solution in XSX, as it extends all the way up the pipeline. Having less silicon in the APU dedicated to the GPU CUs was the trade-off they made to get max sustained throughput across the entire system with fewer bottlenecks. The example I see is near instant / 1 sec load times vs 3 to 4 seconds load times. At the 1 second level, you can start making substantial game design and interaction advancements.
Just as XSX will be a bit better than PS5 in visual fidelity and performance, PS5 will have an advantage in what that brings to the table. I think it's huge because it's almost like returning to the dream of having an inline rom-cart console with today's graphical capabilities.
I see. I hope it's worth it - it's going to need to offer truly insane bang-for-buck.
haha yeah i was wondering why he quoted that reddit thread when there's been two threads on jason's podcast. one from the man himself.
We also don't know what the difference in cooling systems are. It's also entirely possible that Sony will just straight-up take a heavier loss to get down to $399 - I might be being overly reactionary, but I feel like they should do that to counter some of the bad PR going around currently. In fact, if the BC situation really isn't complete, I think they NEED to go $399. If they don't, easy trade-ins will effectively make a $499 Series X cheaper.
My dream now would be PS5 with full BC at $399, and also a $499 model with 1650GB storage and a second controller.
My understanding is it can be. That's why both Sony and Microsoft have included more dedicated resources for it, to reduce or eliminate CPU usage.
Sony's GNMX was an API that supported earlier DirectX functionalities. I'd assume they'll have something similar in place on PS5, for the benefit of multiplatform studios who are based in DirectX.
Reddit - Dive into anything
Wanted to point people to this thread before this reddit post gets taken out of hand.
What I actually said on Kotaku Splitscreen about the PlayStation 5's specs
Earlier today, someone made an awful thread based on a lengthy conversation I had on the Kotaku Splitscreen podcast by transcribing a single line from it, and it led to 12 pages of truly embarrassing discourse. Since so many of you commented and reacted without actually listening to the episode...
www.resetera.com
Most likely because they're talking about it in the Xbox thread :)
No, I meant that people are generally using these points as a main differentiater between systems, even though XSX has similar solutions. What I'm really getting at is that we don't really know enough to say that PS5's bespoke audio chips are better than XSX's, nor do we know how much the PS5's storage speed advantage will translate into a substantive difference when XSX has bespoke asic's for handling storage data transfer as well.
Audio doesn't need 20% of the GPU power. And are you quoting a random youtube comment? The PS5 is going be great, but it appears some weirdos are grasping at anything that might somehow bridge the gap in raw compute performance. Spoiler alert: It can't. But will it matter in the end? We have to see games. but IMO the difference will be smaller then what people think. But there WILL be a difference.Interesting post on what Tempest could mean for the PS5, well worth a read.
The SSD size I have seen close to that are 800, 960 and 1 TB. So unless Sony is ordering custom sized SSD, I would imagine they would just bump it up to 1 TB. Don't know. We still don't know about the file sizes and how they anticipate that for next gen. This wasn't a full reveal, just some tech talk.
I don't know... but I strongly doubt that the very thing that is at the center of everything PS5 something that would throttle down.
Oh crap, sorry for the typo, meant to say advertise. Looks like it's wait and see.
- Status