PlayStation 5 uncovered: the Mark Cerny tech deep dive [Digital Foundry]

[Diarrhea Day-Lewis]

With that PS5 experience set up, my guess is they were going to have a proper reveal, not just a dev talk, in March but COVID post poned it. They probably planned to show off DS5 but not the system, and wait until May/June to do so.

Idk I feel like they'll do a PS5 online presentation either a week before TLOU2 or a week after, so late May-early June. If COVID infections/deaths have peaked and are starting to come down, even slightly, in major areas (EU/US/JP/Etc) then I could see them waiting on that. As is, its hard to get news coverage with so much negativity going around with this virus. Might as well wait until public sentiment begins to change, or at least has reasons that it will change in the near future.

On topic, it seems to be clear to me that it should be able to do peak CPU/GPU at all times for the most part, should be playing 4,000+ PS4 titles at launch, so I'm good. Just need a price, date, and place to pre-order.

 

[IvanSlavkov]

There's a dictionary definition for 'potentially'. We both know it. If you don't, it's a quick Google search away. I consider your question to be trollish in nature.

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I do know the definition, thank you. But now I understand your concern for which I thank you again.

 

[Deleted member 43]

DF makes a point that increasing the clock without increasing bandwidth limits the performance gains, and as they show, for a rdan1 gpu with same amount of CUs and BW than ps5 at 1.9ghz you already start seeing the gains being disproportional (they increase 200mhz from 1.7 to 1. 9 and saw twice the performance gain than going from 1.9 to 2.1).

With the large bandwidth gap it's hard to tell where the performance gap of these machines are going to be and for what workloads. (kinda like in some games X can blast through the 40% difference due the higher bandwidth).

But I do think it is not sounding to be as drastic as X to Pro

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The systems will end up being closer than the PS4 vs. XBO or X vs. Pro.

 

[foamdino]

I asked you a simple question, after being wrong for two decades reading tech and the market why do you believe you are right this time?

Everything else is just hubris.

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It's concerning that you are attacking a member of the forum - please stop

 

[Dokkaebi G0SU]

I read the article, and while it is great and in-depth on the technical side, I'm getting PS3 vibes. All of these exotic engines and magical hardware (ssd). It's sounding more and more like the run up to the PS3 launch, tbh. Cell was unique but nobody bothered to take advantage of it, really, outside of Sony's internal studios.

I walked away from that article asking when are they going to *actually* show this magical SSD configuration outside of Spiderman city blocks. They've been hyping it and hyping it all the way back to the Wired article.

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didnt cerny mention they changed things up from ps4 to ps5 to make the ps5 more like the ps3 with their "spu"s or something? idk what it means but i remember something like that.

 

[BoxManLocke]

I remember him from the days of old, a simple gofreak neogaf google search confirmed what I already suspected

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Cool, no one gives a shit about that axe you have to grind though.

God the big reveals can't come soon enough. I'm glad I wasn't here last gen because those threads are horrible.

 

[True_fan]

True fan TF Teraflop

Who's alt?

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Not an ALT and not trolling.

I will ask one simple question. Has it been confirmed that the boost clocks can run at max 100% of the time for every game. If the answer is no, it causes confusion because now you have more questions 1) what type of games game run at max 100% of time 2) for demanding games games what % of the time are both operating at max....

My point is sony is being vague intentionally.

 

[Yerffej]

The differences people are going to see between the third party titles on each console are going to be very minimal overall.

 

[gofreak]

I asked you a simple question, after being wrong for two decades reading tech and the market why do you believe you are right this time?

Everything else is just hubris.

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Well while I have certainly been wrong, and while you are entitled to your opinion, I don't think I'm wrong in everything I've ever written for 'two decades', and I don't think I'm wrong in the above post you addressed.

If you think I am wrong in that post, please share your understanding and contribute to the discussion so we all might learn from your understanding of it.

Otherwise, kindly, stop derailing with frankly odd grudges from old forums.

 

[PLASTICA-MAN]

he says at some point that the SSD is so fast that games don't need to render anything that isn't in the player field of view, something that can potentially allow more free power...

I wonder if that could also be use for higher FOV's too

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Yeah. I imagien this too. But all of this is for exclusive games. Don't expect such hardware specific stuff to happen on multiplatform games even on PC because such ideas will take advantage of the local hardware.

 

[Nightengale]

didnt cerny mention they changed things up from ps4 to ps5 to make the ps5 more like the ps3 with their "spu"s or something? idk what it means but i remember something like that.

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The audio-related aspects of PS5 ( Tempest Engine ) is more like SPUs as they are well suited to audio.

 

[chris 1515]

I read the article, and while it is great and in-depth on the technical side, I'm getting PS3 vibes. All of these exotic engines and magical hardware (ssd). It's sounding more and more like the run up to the PS3 launch, tbh. Cell was unique but nobody bothered to take advantage of it, really, outside of Sony's internal studios.

I walked away from that article asking when are they going to *actually* show this magical SSD configuration outside of Spiderman city blocks. They've been hyping it and hyping it all the way back to the Wired article.

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This is easy to use the SSD at least for loading faster. This is what the third party will do.

 

[Star-Lord]

I asked you a simple question, after being wrong for two decades reading tech and the market why do you believe you are right this time?

Everything else is just hubris.

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Dude, just stop. Why keep brining up the twenty years, just accept people have different opinions. Stop attacking him for his belief.

 

[modiz]

I read the article, and while it is great and in-depth on the technical side, I'm getting PS3 vibes. All of these exotic engines and magical hardware (ssd). It's sounding more and more like the run up to the PS3 launch, tbh. Cell was unique but nobody bothered to take advantage of it, really, outside of Sony's internal studios.

I walked away from that article asking when are they going to *actually* show this magical SSD configuration outside of Spiderman city blocks. They've been hyping it and hyping it all the way back to the Wired article.

Click to shrink...

there are differences than the PS3 era.
first, the very fast SSD is what developers asked for.
second, the system was made for ease of development. back in the PS3 era even just making a game without trying to squeeze more performance was a pain so developers didnt look into how much more can they optimize, now running the game is easier and as a developer you got more options to tap into beyond that.

 

[thuway]

In the real world I expect ports to look near identical. Great news about 10.24 TF.

 

[riotous]

I read the article, and while it is great and in-depth on the technical side, I'm getting PS3 vibes. All of these exotic engines and magical hardware (ssd). It's sounding more and more like the run up to the PS3 launch, tbh. Cell was unique but nobody bothered to take advantage of it, really, outside of Sony's internal studios.

I walked away from that article asking when are they going to *actually* show this magical SSD configuration outside of Spiderman city blocks. They've been hyping it and hyping it all the way back to the Wired article.

Click to shrink...

SSD is not very difficult to take advantage of; particularly with low CPU usage.

Variable clocks aren't THAT exotic either. Nothing close to Cell like complexity / differences with what devs are used to. Also Sony reportedly PURPOSEFULLY withheld the documentation for how to take advantage of the Cell processor so that their 1st party games would look superior. Different Sony these days wouldn't do that kind of thing.

 

[Deleted member 43]

I read the article, and while it is great and in-depth on the technical side, I'm getting PS3 vibes. All of these exotic engines and magical hardware (ssd). It's sounding more and more like the run up to the PS3 launch, tbh. Cell was unique but nobody bothered to take advantage of it, really, outside of Sony's internal studios.

I walked away from that article asking when are they going to *actually* show this magical SSD configuration outside of Spiderman city blocks. They've been hyping it and hyping it all the way back to the Wired article.

Click to shrink...

It's absolutely not like the PS3. If a developer wants to they can basically just ignore the variable clocks and the increased SSD speeds and call it a day.

 

[foamdino]

I gathered 2 new pieces of info that were very interesting:

1. How the developers actually access the ssd - by id instead of file paths - so it behaves like S3 ;-) - als the fact that the devs can make requests with such small latency (1ms) to get data - that's pretty amazing
2. The comment on VALU usage - so if Cerny is to be believed a typical game workload on a 10TF GPU would only really be using 4TF of compute (and in his quote he suggested that was doing well!)

 

[Lukas Taves]

No, this is the time it takes for the system to notice a workload change and respond - not the time it sustains a change in clock. So within a few frames it responds with a throttle if you become 'power intensive'.

He is clear elsewhere in his expectation that 'most of the time' in most workloads, the two will run along at or near peak clocks. That could yet turn out to be a wrong expectation, if processing on both cpu and gpu are 'typically' simultaneously more power intensive than he expects. But the above is not about how long peak clocks can be sustained for. Indeed he explicitly says elsewhere in the article that it's not a case of boosting clocks for short periods at a time until e.g. thermals become a problem.

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It seems to me like the gpu can go up and down within a few frames, and they "ensure" most of the time the gpu will stay close to the max because gpu load isn't sustained for more than a few frames, which I think does hold true for most games, specially the ones with locked or semi locked fps.

 

[Era of not Yakuza]

The PS5 spec story sure feels convoluted and messy

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Any specific example? Perhaps we can help you with what seems to be a problem.

 

[gundamkyoukai]

I read the article, and while it is great and in-depth on the technical side, I'm getting PS3 vibes. All of these exotic engines and magical hardware (ssd). It's sounding more and more like the run up to the PS3 launch, tbh. Cell was unique but nobody bothered to take advantage of it, really, outside of Sony's internal studios.

I walked away from that article asking when are they going to *actually* show this magical SSD configuration outside of Spiderman city blocks. They've been hyping it and hyping it all the way back to the Wired article.

Click to shrink...

It's not like Cell since Cerny make this stuff easy for devs to use .
You can go deeper but it will be no problem for them to use it .
I mean were you expecting new stuff when this base on the GDC ?

 

[Deleted member 50658]

It's not thousands on day one though, the gymnastics should've made that clear, which isn't the case for competition.

Xbox SX ~ 2k+
PS5 ~ 100+

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Yeah the majority of 4000 titles working at launch as they said certainly is 100+ that's simple math.

 

[Dark1x]

For some reason Mark Cerny/ Sony seems extremely wary of DF/ Eurogamer (which might very simply be that they have their own timeline for reveals), whereas MS seems to just have full open access and a ton of coverage lined up with them.

Which brings me to a question I have for Dark1x for the sake of transparency (and my apologies if this has already been discussed/ asked):
Is there a contractual agreement to cover the Series X between Eurogamer/ DF and Microsoft, for some kind of exclusive access (much in the same way Sony seemed to have a deal with Wired last year) ?

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There is no such agreement at all. We're free to do as we please with the information we gleaned during the visit. Same goes for Austin Evans who was on-site with us! It's literally just a normal kind of press visit.

I think it's just the difference between a Japanese and American company more than anything. Sony is just holding the cards close to their chest at the moment. Also, the virus situation hurt our plans for this (not that it was going to involve seeing the box or anything). The Xbox stuff just squeaked by.

I think there are just more limits here as Microsoft had already revealed a lot more before we saw anything. Sony is taking a very different approach and that's fine! We'll know more soon enough.

 

[sncvsrtoip]

DF makes a point that increasing the clock without increasing bandwidth limits the performance gains, and as they show, for a rdan1 gpu with same amount of CUs and BW than ps5 at 1.9ghz you already start seeing the gains being disproportional (they increase 200mhz from 1.7 to 1. 9 and saw twice the performance gain than going from 1.9 to 2.1).

With the large bandwidth gap it's hard to tell where the performance gap of these machines are going to be and for what workloads. (kinda like in some games X can blast through the 40% difference due the higher bandwidth).

But I do think it is not sounding to be as drastic as X to Pro

Click to shrink...

We don't know how scale big navi (probably not bad but also not ideally linear)

 

[Deleted member 32679]

Anyone have a TLDW for the video?

 

[Hasan Ali Almaci]

It's concerning that you are attacking a member of the forum - please stop

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ok

 

[Cactuar]

No because their plan is actually working.

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Sony's plan has been working for 25 years. Have they been confusing us until release, and giving us hope about some secret sauce all this time?

 

[Hasan Ali Almaci]

Well while I have certainly been wrong, and while you are entitled to your opinion, I don't think I'm wrong in everything I've ever written for 'two decades', and I don't think I'm wrong in the above post you addressed.

If you think I am wrong in that post, please share your understanding and contribute to the discussion so we all might learn from your understanding of it.

Otherwise, kindly, stop derailing with frankly odd grudges from old forums.

Click to shrink...

ok

 

[HeWhoWalks]

True fan TF Teraflop

Who's alt?

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Not an alt, but someone known to concern troll Sony related stuff in more places than here (yes, he uses the same name across multiple sites :P).

OT: In any event, outside of the back-and-forth, I'm excited to see hardware go back to a more unique approach versus the nearly off-shelf PC part consoles of the 8th generation. Yes, I get some of the skepticism about the SSD, but after listening to some of the developers, and knowing Cerny's track record, I'm confident in the ability of the PS5 to deliver.

 

[Thiago]

Anyone have a TLDW for the video?

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PlayStation 5 uncovered: the Mark Cerny tech deep dive

On March 18th, Sony finally broke cover with in-depth information on the technical make-up of PlayStation 5. Expanding …

www.eurogamer.net

Not exactly a TLDW, but if you can't watch, there's a text version.

 

[Deleted member 2441]

For some reason Mark Cerny/ Sony seems extremely wary of DF/ Eurogamer (which might very simply be that they have their own timeline for reveals), whereas MS seems to just have full open access and a ton of coverage lined up with them.

Which brings me to a question I have for Dark1x for the sake of transparency (and my apologies if this has already been discussed/ asked):
Is there a contractual agreement to cover the Series X between Eurogamer/ DF and Microsoft, for some kind of exclusive access (much in the same way Sony seemed to have a deal with Wired last year) ?

Click to shrink...

This is a warped presentation of how PR/media relations actually functions. There will be no "contract" tied to coverage like this.

It's already a naturally beneficial process for both parties. MS/Sony get to deliver their message in a controlled environment and DF/Wired get first/exclusive access to it.

Exclusives in the media are extremely common and not as nefarious or sneaky as folks like to believe. They're not contracts. They're not as transactional as this makes it out to be.

If you work in games media and MS/Sony offers you an exclusive interview/demo on their new hardware anyone will take it.

 

[bitcloudrzr]

Well while I have certainly been wrong, and while you are entitled to your opinion, I don't think I'm wrong in everything I've ever written for 'two decades', and I don't think I'm wrong in the above post you addressed.

If you think I am wrong in that post, please share your understanding and contribute to the discussion so we all might learn from your understanding of it.

Otherwise, kindly, stop derailing with frankly odd grudges from old forums.

Click to shrink...

 

[EBomb]

It's absolutely not like the PS3. If a developer wants to they can basically just ignore the variable clocks and the increased SSD speeds and call it a day.

Click to shrink...

Yes, I imagine 3rd party Devs will look at whether their game is GPU bound or CPU bound, prioritize the bound processor, and deal with any throttling to the unbound processor. First party will wring every ounce of power by finely tuning power consumption for both the CPU and GPU.

 

[big_z]

With the thermal threshold being tied to boost clocks wont that mean if you hot box your ps5 in an entertainment unit like many people do the system won't be able to maintain max clocks as often as one in open space?

Anyone have a TLDW for the video?

Click to shrink...

Nothing new, just reworded in a way to make things a little more digestible.

 

[SuperBoss]

PS5 seems just so goddamn exciting. Cannot wait to see more!

Already was hyped on other technical aspects, but the more I hear about the audio engine the more excited I'm getting about it. Gaming immersiveness on PS5 should be special.

 

[gundamkyoukai]

It's absolutely not like the PS3. If a developer wants to they can basically just ignore the variable clocks and the increased SSD speeds and call it a day.

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Matt a question .
We know alot of things scale with engines so in the future will the SSD speeds aspects be build into them like other things are now .

 

[GymWolf86]

Not an ALT and not trolling.

I will ask one simple question. Has it been confirmed that the boost clocks can run at max 100% of the time for every game. If the answer is no, it causes confusion because now you have more questions 1) what type of games game run at max 100% of time 2) for demanding games games what % of the time are both operating at max....

My point is sony is being vague intentionally.

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i think they don't know the answer yet.
when uber heavy games like gta6 are gonna come out we are gonna see how much the console is capable of having both cpu and gpu at max clock at the same time.

for now, neither sony or any person in this topic know the answer, this is the truth.

rdr2 pushed the current gen console to their limits, we have to wait for games like that to really see how ps5 is gonna work with intense scenes both for gpu and cpu.

 

[ThatNerdGUI]

I don't know why I have this in my suggested videos but it's fun to watch too:

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So much stuff wrong in that video

 

[Deleted member 43]

With the thermal threshold being tied to boost clocks wont that mean if you hot box your ps5 in an entertainment unit like many people do the system won't be able to maintain max clocks as often as one in open space?

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No, it's not thermal bound in a traditional sense, it's bound by the electric draw. The system won't throttle by heat.

Matt a question .
We know alot of things scale with engines so in the future will the SSD speeds aspects be build into them like other things are now .

Click to shrink...

Yes.

Yes, I imagine 3rd party Devs will look at whether their game is GPU bound or CPU bound, prioritize the bound processor, and deal with any throttling to the unbound processor. First party will wring every ounce of power by finely tuning power consumption for both the CPU and GPU.

Click to shrink...

That or they just set the clocks to effectively max and change the workload (graphic effects, etc.) to maintain the performance they want, basically how every other system works.

 

[III-V]

Seeing the alts come out now after yesterdays bans.


not saying big_z is alt btw.

With the thermal threshold being tied to boost clocks wont that mean if you hot box your ps5 in an entertainment unit like many people do the system won't be able to maintain max clocks as often as one in open space?

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"The behaviour of all PS5s is the same," says Cerny. "If you play the same game and go to the same location in the game, it doesn't matter which custom chip you have and what its transistors are like. It doesn't matter if you put it in your stereo cabinet or your refrigerator, your PS5 will get the same frequencies for CPU and GPU as any other PS5."

Click to shrink...

 

[Edgar]

I see the regulars are doing their thing from page 1.

 

[MrKlaw]

Not an ALT and not trolling.

I will ask one simple question. Has it been confirmed that the boost clocks can run at max 100% of the time for every game. If the answer is no, it causes confusion because now you have more questions 1) what type of games game run at max 100% of time 2) for demanding games games what % of the time are both operating at max....

My point is sony is being vague intentionally.

Click to shrink...

It sounded like most workloads will run 100/100 all the time. Some workloads that particularly saturate CPU and/or GPU may clock down slightly.

the analogy in my head is running something like AIDA64 when you're overclocking a PC. Its an artificial benchmark designed to push your CPU way more than it would in normal use, so provides a 'worst case' to test your overclocking and cooling setup.

Sony have comprehensive profiling tools (like MS) and I'm sure they've reviewed many game engines - including most first party games I'm sure - and have real data to be comfortable that their setup will provide enough power for most situations.

 

[Decarb]

What are the tradeoffs? I'm trying to understand what the cons are of variable clocks. I have never heard of variable clocks before so I'm curious why it isn't common if the benefits are as you explained.

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How have you not heard about variable clocks? Outside of console space, everything uses variable clocks including the machine you're using to type on Era (phone/tablet/PC/Mac).

 

[platocplx]

I really want to know why people are so hung up at clocks having to be constantly at 100% at all times. Is there even any game that is constantly taxing systems at all times like that.

And again for people who didnt read about how the architecture works its not dependent on temp anymore its dependent on power draw only, which would totally change how the processors work, and in this article again it re-iterates that there isnt throttling going on.

"The time constant, which is to say the amount of time that the CPU and GPU take to achieve a frequency that matches their activity, is critical to developers," adds Cerny. "It's quite short, if the game is doing power-intensive processing for a few frames, then it gets throttled. There isn't a lag where extra performance is available for several seconds or several minutes and then the system gets throttled; that isn't the world that developers want to live in - we make sure that the PS5 is very responsive to power consumed. In addition to that the developers have feedback on exactly how much power is being used by the CPU and GPU."

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[MrKlaw]

As far as variable frequencies...As long as Horizon Zero Dawn 2 and God of War 2 map screens don't rev the console up for take off, I'll be happy.

Happy for a quieter console period.

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this was the weirdest thing - are there no simple systems in place to detect low load and then either clock down or frame cap to avoid the fans revving up like that?

 

[Maple]

To me the boost clock thing still smells like PR spin. Yes you can run both the CPU and the GPU at max clocks if they're under low load and just doing bit-shifts or something, but will this be the case 3 years from now once next-gen development is in full swing?

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Is that even the case now?

At 4:35 in the video - "More than one developer has told us they are running the CPU throttled back, allowing for excess power to pour into the GPU to ensure a consistently locked 2.23 GHz".

Does the set power envelope restrict both the CPU and GPU from running at max clocks concurrently?

 

[RingRang]

So you are looking at it backwards.

Any developer (including Sony) would ideally prefer the maximum possible GPU and CPU chip performance set at all times.

But that's simply not possible. You just are not able to reach these high clock speeds all the time under every possible workload.

The PS5 is designed to take advantage of the fact that variable performance allows the system to reach a higher performance level than it would if the same hardware had to conform to stable clocks. Stable clocks inevitably leave some performance on the table that the hardware would otherwise be able to achieve with more flexibility.

So, for example, if the SX could magically adopt this variable system with all other specs remaining the same, that would produce a stronger system in the end than the SX is now, not a weaker one. But I say "magically" because that's not possible, there would be trade offs for MS to do this that they did not want to make.

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This is a good explanation. Will be interesting to see how it pans out in the wild.

 

[Deleted member 61469]

Boost clock smells like some bullshit to me.

 

[Deleted member 2441]

Is that even the case now?

At 4:35 in the video - "More than one developer has told us they are running the CPU throttled back, allowing for excess power to pour into the GPU to ensure a consistently locked 2.23 GHz".

Does the set power envelope restrict both the CPU and GPU from running at max clocks concurrently?

Click to shrink...

"There's enough power that both CPU and GPU can potentially run at their limits of 3.5GHz and 2.23GHz, it isn't the case that the developer has to choose to run one of them slower."

this has been quoted multiple times already and was mentioned in the article.

 

[LilScooby77]

Gonna enjoy this one.