I think the important bit with the road to PS5 video was Cerny talking about SSD bottlenecks and how they'd tackle it with custom design choices
-
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.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
PlayStation 5 System Architecture Deep Dive |OT| Secret Agent Cerny
- Thread starter vestan
- Start date
- Status
Im sure there is some of that however at the moment it seems to be the biggest differentiator between the consoles. I'd say it is probably more deserving of discussion than a difference in TFLOPS for sure, given that the gap there amounts to resolution/framerate differences which are not exactly interesting imo.
Just wondering, what's the reason for them both spending resources on SSD:s with custom chips, software, magic and what not? Couldn't they just have used a more "off the shelf" solution and be done with it? Would that not be enough to hit their loading time targets and similar improvements?
In the same line of thought, it seems Sony went the extra mile to really push that bandwidth, why? Is the technology just not that expensive so they thought it was worth it? Do they think they will need it for future games? It almost makes me believe they had something specific in mind.
Knack 3? :P
I agree.
It's not just that tho. Like AegonSnake and some others said, the SSD was a main topic of discussion in the speculation OTs.
Some ppl just wasn't in the OTs as much as some of us.
This isn't new just because of the PS5 GDC talk, or lower tf.
Back then it was no way they going to have a SSD that fast or PC will past it easy .
Be well my friends
Get the hell outta here with your reasonableness, anex.
Waveforms are often used to represent coherency between different signals or data sets. I was merely alluding to the term "coherence" or "coherency".
Admittedly I did a crap job and inadvertently used an overly specific image. I didn't mean to imply fourier transform... Which is a funny coincidence actually, considering its use in acoustics and it being brought up by Cerny in the recent reveal. xD
As someone who went from an office that's super collaborative and in person, WFH is good but disrupts normal work chain and habits so much. You can adjust but it's hard for sure and even if you have good communication it will become worse and bad communication will become dismal
Before the PS5 was officially announced in Wired last year, the CPU was believed to be the biggest generational leap in next gen consoles by everyone. After the reveal, it became clear that it would in fact be the SSD. SSDs aren't a hot topic for console war reasons, but because a 40-100x improvement from the previous generation makes it the biggest leap we've seen in any single console component in a very long time.
You said not every game is Star Citizen and while I agree I think that not every game has had the luxury of being designed for SSDs as the minimum spec. Give AAA developers across the industry that luxury and things can and should change. Also, not every game needs to be as incredibly ambitious as Star Citizen to make use of these SSDs. I expect open world games from the likes of Guerrilla Games, Rockstar and CD Projekt Red to really tap into the potential.
As for XSX vs PS5 SSDs, personally I'm not expecting major design differences between the two in terms of multiplatform titles, for obvious reasons, but 1st party is a whole different beast. Can't wait to see what they do.
I'm in the same boat. It's especially ridiculous when you realize it has become nearly impossible to see the differences in picture quality and fps now that diminishing returns are in full force and pics are either 4k or 1800p+.
Even a massive spec difference like PS4 vs original Xbox One didn't make that much of a difference on screen, and we were playing around 1080p by then. It will be a lot closer next gen.
You definitely won't see any difference between a PS5 and a XBX version of the same game, that's nearly a given when you look at the specs of both.
I'm old, ST vs Amiga now there were real differences, or Atari 2600 vs CBS Collecovision. Now THAT was a difference. ^^
Wow, almost a lazy dev rethoric here!?!
Publishers aren't techs, first.
Second, I don't know a lot of people who are doing business through Visio. Some ongoing business, yes. The start of big project, very difficult to do.
If everyone was just working from home, that would be one thing. Instead you have people who are sick, people taking care of folks who are sick, many people have friends who are out of work and need some consoling and generally cheering up, anyone with kids has them home 24/7 with no school and no caretakers, shopping for necessities is suddenly a craps shoot, etc. The idea that productivity is impaired shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone paying just a little bit of attention to what's going on in the world.
Yeah I agree. Even healthy, its hard to get your work done in the same way.
I can imagine Sony doubling the CU count like they did on Pro while boosting the clocks to 2.5 it more on a smaller node. 2.5ghz at 72CUs doesn't sound crazy considering the Xbox specs. But a dev I've been talking to always asks me what's the point of those pro console if these upcoming "base" can do CG like visuals already. And it makes sense considering that the limit for next gen won't be hardware but artistic skill, time and budget.
I think you missed the point a bit here. Star Citizen is the exception because they take the luxury responsibility to requires a SSD.
Here, you are saying that most games doesn't required SSD, like they had the choice. Game are designed by limitations, not the other way.
I don't think there are a lot of AAA games, open world or not, which don't rely on data streaming at some point.
Agree about the CPU.
Certainly they can, and while I'm not in game development, I am in software development and it's much easier having discussions in person. Obviously, the way the world was even before COVID-19, people are used to remote collaboration. But I can tell you, the amount of misunderstandings are a lot higher and I was just working on websites, not complicated work like in games. Communication is a skill like any other and not everyone has it, including many software devs I know.
Thinking about the SSD speeds, doesn't it mean we could have games that can jump from scene to scene, location to location, in an instant. Literally a jump cut from one unique area to a whole other unique area.
Consider how Cerny discusses literally loading only the assets you need in your field of view and just beyond... if the game is expecting a jump cut to a whole different area it can cull what's behind you and cache the assets it needs in the immediate viewing area of the next scene ready to cut in one frame. No fade to black needed, no jumping to a videoclip while the next area loads. Remember even if it just loads up a 90 degree section in front of you the SSD is fast enough to load surrounding assets ready to go (if gameplay is resuming immediately rather than a cut-scen) in a fraction of a second. I think for developers really wanting to explore proper movie style story telling but in a game this could be amazing. Instant cuts in GTA from one character to another at the other side of the world. Storytelling in gampeplay will absolutely be unleashed for developers who no longer need to worry about using video cut-scenes to help transition or whatever other tricks they employ (or indeed just concepts that get binned because right now they are simply technically not possible). Gonna be great.
Consider how Cerny discusses literally loading only the assets you need in your field of view and just beyond... if the game is expecting a jump cut to a whole different area it can cull what's behind you and cache the assets it needs in the immediate viewing area of the next scene ready to cut in one frame. No fade to black needed, no jumping to a videoclip while the next area loads. Remember even if it just loads up a 90 degree section in front of you the SSD is fast enough to load surrounding assets ready to go (if gameplay is resuming immediately rather than a cut-scen) in a fraction of a second. I think for developers really wanting to explore proper movie style story telling but in a game this could be amazing. Instant cuts in GTA from one character to another at the other side of the world. Storytelling in gampeplay will absolutely be unleashed for developers who no longer need to worry about using video cut-scenes to help transition or whatever other tricks they employ (or indeed just concepts that get binned because right now they are simply technically not possible). Gonna be great.
I work from home since 13th March. I have a 4 years old son and he begins to be nervous to stay at home all day. We work using Skype and slack but this is not as good as work from the office.
I wonder if the choice to have a relatively narrow but blazingly fast GPU was a strategic decision that was primarily based on / driven by the focal goal of drastically improving I/O throughput and eliminating bottlenecks all along the I/O pipeline, beginning to end. Cerney mentioned several times that increasing the clock speed has an outsized effect on increasing the GPU cache bandwidth which directly feeds the GPU at the end of the I/O pipeline, thus removing a bottleneck to keeping the GPU fully saturated most of the time. Also, having fewer CUs enables devs to fully saturate the GPU more easily. It's almost as if Cerney designed/engineered the PS5's overall system architecture from the starting point of the super fast SSD, decompression hardware, and I/O hardware and then moved backwards/downstream to the RAM, CPU, and GPU.
This seems to be the opposite of the more traditional design philosophy that MS took with XSX.
I am very curious to see how this risk taking on Sony's part will pan out.
This seems to be the opposite of the more traditional design philosophy that MS took with XSX.
I am very curious to see how this risk taking on Sony's part will pan out.
Just as easy as 'Press this button to port game.', right?
Home working requires a LOT more backend work than just Skype.
Not everyone has the home broadband infrastructure to support pulling down a daily build of a game at speeds comparable to the office, either, and a lot of companies deliberately limit access externally to critical resources for security and secrecy reasons. It's going to be bad enough for current-generation development. Imagine trying to work on a next-gen title where everyone has to share limited available dev kits, and those have to remain in an approved, secured facility. If anything makes launching this holiday tough, it's going to be getting the launch title lineup in good shape, not the hardware manufacturing side of things.
I agree, and I hope they can achieve it with 2 chiplets plus Infinity Fabric (then the PS5 Slim could just use one of those chiplets).
Seems clear to me - higher resolutions, better framerates and better RT. Cerny showed this look at the different implementations of RT:
If games on the PS5 run at a mix of native 1800p/2160p and reconstructed 2160p at 30-60 fps with implementations of RT that hit various points along that line, then a PS5 Pro with double the CUs and 10% higher clocks could probably crank their resolutions and/or framerates (we could see a lot of native 4K60 and reconstructed 4K120) while hitting EVERY point on that line outside of Full Ray Tracing (which I think will be restricted to older titles until PS6).
SSD gave the greatest performance bump for the price on PCs for years. NVMe bumps up the bandwidth which added in an even larger performance bump vs SATA. The experience on both of the next generation consoles are going to be mind blowing for most people. It is not surprising that Sony invested heavily in this.
I can't wait to see the PS5 (and XSX) in action with actual next-generation games.
I can't wait to see the PS5 (and XSX) in action with actual next-generation games.
The way I see it:
- Multiplatform games won't be able to fully utilize the PS5's and XSX's SSDs due to thebase consoles still requiring a HDD as a minimum spec. Also, PC games currently don't have a SSD as a minimum required spec.
- Sony's 1st party next-gen only games will most likely be able to demonstrate what a game that requires a SSD will be like.
- The same with MS, but it may take them a bit longer since they'll be supporting XB1/XB1X for at least a year or so after the release of the XBSX. Even then, with supporting the PC, unless they make their games require a SSD as a minimum spec on there, I don't know how much of a difference there will be with game design.
Of course, I can be completely wrong and the SSDs in both consoles won't really change anything in regards to game design.
- Multiplatform games won't be able to fully utilize the PS5's and XSX's SSDs due to thebase consoles still requiring a HDD as a minimum spec. Also, PC games currently don't have a SSD as a minimum required spec.
- Sony's 1st party next-gen only games will most likely be able to demonstrate what a game that requires a SSD will be like.
- The same with MS, but it may take them a bit longer since they'll be supporting XB1/XB1X for at least a year or so after the release of the XBSX. Even then, with supporting the PC, unless they make their games require a SSD as a minimum spec on there, I don't know how much of a difference there will be with game design.
Of course, I can be completely wrong and the SSDs in both consoles won't really change anything in regards to game design.
Those threads were crazy. What some wanted like 4GB LPDDR4 for OS, HBM3, 20GB/s ReRAM and 13 - 14TF for $499.
A mid gen console would only make sense if 8K becomes a thing. If there is prolonged recession or prices do not come down as fast then there remains no reason for them to take that risk.
I agree that "everything is static on disk" is not a practical approach. Also agree that overall both consoles are getting a massive leap together.
Respectfully though, I do not believe next-gen AAA games will need to target Star Citizen like scope to encounter practical use cases for the PS5 SSD's added bandwidth.
I just need to ask since Cerny brought it up, how much better was the audio capability of the PS3 over the PS4? Was it noticeable to the end user? I bought a PS3 near the end of last gen and can't recall much to say if there was a difference.
If there was a significant difference that might be a good starting point for the PS5's audio.
If there was a significant difference that might be a good starting point for the PS5's audio.
Sony demoed multichannel audio in 2005:
I have no idea if the PS4 would be capable of doing the same thing.
Last edited:
Another question, on the subject of destructible objects and environments, I know the CPU is the star of the show there, but does the SSD also play a noteworthy role in streaming in assets on the fly as things are breaking apart?
I imagine smaller scale destruction can just make do with whatever is in the RAM, but I'm taking major destruction like a tornado tearing up buildings or something like that. Does the SSD play a noteworthy role in that scenario?
I imagine smaller scale destruction can just make do with whatever is in the RAM, but I'm taking major destruction like a tornado tearing up buildings or something like that. Does the SSD play a noteworthy role in that scenario?
two fun ones:
remember Soul Reavers world shifting? Imagine if that was more dramatic and instant without the obvious loading animations.
Bloodborne: picture this: when you die instead of the long death animation and load times you just instantly appeared back in the dream. Maybe some fancy tearing though reality animation for effectbut more or less blam dead and you are there before you could say what hit me.
Very well said, exactly what I think Sony is shooting for. The SSD speed won't just get rid of loading in the traditional sense, it will allow for games to be made with a much more movie like cohesive quality without all the interruptions. In a way It'll be like games moving out of the shitty video buffering days of old stream services. Pauses in the action (movies, games, whatever) are immersion breaking and it would be amazing if Sony has found a good solution to this issue in games.
Combined with a heavy focus on QOL features, jump in jump out play, enhanced social and share features (like sharing playable game play sections instead of videos), and a system built around such a fast SSD sounds great. It will significantly change the way we play.
For reference I expect Microsoft to also have similar features, just less well implemented due to half the SSD speed. Instead I'd guess they focus on raw power and visual performance being it's stand out. Will be interesting to see what level of feature parity we end up with. Sounds like both machines will be just different enough I will need both.
This is where a private client of ps now/xcloud could come in super handy for testing certain things
I imagine a matrix game where one second your in the real world, you jack in to the matrix and then immediately you're in the white space picking out guns.
Again I heard about a demo with destruction. Like the things from clothes in Ubi R&D we will see crazy baked destruction but without losing the interactivity far above anything realtime is able to do. I need to search in this presentation but it can help reduce some problems of realtime rendering/physics they talked about difficult things to do in realtime in a 2015 SIGGRAPH presentation. It can help with some of the problem, they talk about at the end.
It would be time-saving and better for the player in the end, but it would change nothing of the game.
I mean, the games are still the same in every example. I would like to see how this changes something more than saving some seconds in load times
If you've taken the time to actually take a look at what actual developers have been saying about next gen then you'll know that the SSD storage is what they're most excited about. As far as I know, not a single dev has pointed at the GPU as their favourite part of next gen. Several have praised the Zen2 CPUs, and all love the SSD.
Cerny: Our storage solution will allow developers to stream data from storage at 9 GBps and-
Resetera: LIES! MYSTICISM!
Cerny: No really. You can see our patents. It's all there-
Resetera: WITCHCRAFT! SMOKE AND MIRRORS!
Sorry anex, most of the wisdom is hidden by that amazing avatar Transistor gifted you.Be well my friends
I love these little tech demos. I hope we're getting one for the consumer reveal of the PS5 but I think if there was a tech demo to show, they would have shown it at the GDC talk...
User banned (3 days): Platform warring
Every gaming console or PC is defined by the CPU, GPU and RAM. Storage is something that adds flexibility, but how a game plays and how a game looks is always going to be defined by the former.
My name is Transistor and I approve this messageBe well my friends
I find it baffling they didn't show anything as it's common for presenters to use tech demos to visualize their points during GDC talks.
I don't know why they chose not to show anything, but to me it's a bit alarming and makes it seem they're behind scheldue and actually couldn't show anything.
TF and GPU/CPU increase is a linear upgrade, you expect that kinda shit every gen. It's expected and it's boring. I love playing prettier games every gen but this time fighting over which one is going to be prettier just feels dumb. One is 2160 while there other is 2000 or slightly less... Seriously I have no problem with PS5 not hitting native 4k as long as frame rate is consistent.
With SSD we now have a far better base and foundation, it's far better increase, I've been more excited about the SSD since confirmation last year. The faster the better I say and that's not me downplaying TF.
With SSD we now have a far better base and foundation, it's far better increase, I've been more excited about the SSD since confirmation last year. The faster the better I say and that's not me downplaying TF.
Now that's just blatantly false. I can name several games off the top of my head where the entire game's world/level design is entirely dependent on slow data transfer rates by mechanical HDDs. Can you imagine what Destiny might look like if each area wasn't separated by immersion-breaking, slow, isolated, long winding corridors? Or how much more enjoyable the game would be if you didn't have to go through a 2 minute loading screen every time you went to orbit or started a new activity? Marvel's Spider-Man is also a very famous example of how the entire game's world design was entirely dependent on data streaming speeds limited by the PS4's mechanical hard drive.
So tell me again how storage is something unimportant that does nothing more than add some flexibility.
Oi, Transistor. I demand my avatar.
but plz don't make it as bad as chris
You know, I've never really questioned those connection areas... It's crazy how normalized these systems have gotten.
Hopefully Destiny 3 is next gen only.
- Status