PS5 News, Price, Release Date And Games: The Ultimate Guide To Sony's PlayStation 5 Ps5 Specs Leak
An official PlayStation 5 event was held today at 9am Pacific Time (about 4pm in the UK) promising to go "under the hood" on the PS5's specs and features, with the event livestreamed on the PlayStation Blog and YouTube.
The event was fronted by the PlayStation 5's lead system architect Mark Cerny, and what he revealed can be watched directly below.
Following the official PS5 event video, is an in-brief rundown of what was revealed, followed by everything we already know about the PlayStation 5 console to date.
Watch the Sony PlayStation 5 event here
Sony PS5 event: what's been announced so far
Mark Cerny takes to the stage first and starts talking about console design. The PS5 is based around three principals. Number 1 is listening to developers. Once every two years Mark Cerny takes a tour of the developers, apparently, and it requires weeks on the road. It is incredibly value, though. The number one ask by developers with PS5 was an SSD.
Balancing evolution and revolution is the second principal. Cerny notes that consoles need to move forward in terms of hardware and abilities, but that they need it to still be approachable in terms of making games. Reducing "dead time" to zero is important for Cerny. With PlayStation 5 getting up to speed will take roughly a month for developers.
Finding new dreams is the third principal. Custom engine for audio in the PS5 is a good example of this, apparently. Cerny says he will talk more about this later.
Cerny moves on to talking about SSD loading speeds. Compression ratios are discussed, as well as hard drives and Blu-ray discs. 1GB is roughly 20 seconds to load from a HDD, according to Cerny. This is why load times on PS4 can be rough.
If we could load 5GB a second from an SSD, Cerny asks, what would be possible going forward in video games. 2GB can loaded in 0.27 seconds on an SSD. This means there is no loading screens.
The primary reason for an ultra fast SSD, though, isn't just about loading times. It is about giving developers freedom when creating games — you don't want loading screens getting in the way of awesome virtual worlds. You also have hard limits imposed on the player in the game, who can't move faster than the HDD dictates.
SSD's improve game patch installs, too. The SSD on the PS5 is, according to Cerny, 100x faster. Cerny is now talking about overheads. There is Custom Flash Controller in the PS5 to help this, to ensure no bottlenecks. Priority requests are very important in games, and this controller helps deliver these. 5.5GB/s is the bandwidth the PS5 is capable of — nice!
The PS5 uses the Kraken model of compression, which differs from the system used on PS4. The custom decompressor can output up to 22GB theoretically. There is also a dedicated DMA controller and two I/O co-processors. Coherency engines are also present in the PS5's main custom chipset, as well as cache scrubbers.
The Sony PS5 is going to support external hard disc drives. Cerny also confirms that the Sony PS5 will support M2 SSD drives, meaning people can increase their storage. These SSDs need to be as fast as the stock PS5 SSD though to work, so 5.5GB/s. M2 PCIe 4.0 SSDs are coming that support up to 7GB/s.
Cerny says don't buy an M2 drive until later in the year to ensure compatibility. Ok, Mark!
GPUs are up next. The PS5 GPU needs to run PlayStation 4 games, which it can do thanks to some awesome work from AMD. The GPU supports ray tracing. It is a custom RDNA 2 chip from AMD, which is optimised for performance. We have our own needs for PlayStation, says Cerny, and AMD helped with this when working on PS5. Those cache scrubbers are mentioned again as a good example of this.
The PS5's custom chips has the logic and feature set that the PS4 and PS4 Pro used, meaning that backwards compatibility is definitely in the new console, and shouldn't be costly. Results are excellent, though, says Cerny. They tested the top 100 games played on PS4 by play time and they all ran perfectly on PS5. That's great news!
The PS5 has a new Geometry Engine. This can help performance optimisation with primitive shaders, which is a new tech. Improvement to particle and special effects are one benefit of using these shaders.
The inter-section engine is now introduced, with BVH Acceleration Structure mentioned. This is all about the PS5's ray tracing abilities. Cerny says there is no need to use ray tracing, but it will be available. Audio, global illumination, shadows, reflections and full ray tracing are potentials for the PS5's ray tracing tech.
Now Cerny moves onto frequencies. Cerny likes running tech fast, but you have to factor in heat and power consumption. For PS4 they tried to model for a worst case scenario in terms of heat and power draw. This works if the console is quite and cool while playing, and doesn't if it is hot and loud.
On PS5 Sony has gone a different direction. It has a variable frequency strategy, which means the CPU and GPU are permanently run in boost mode, but the frequency changes. This means the power draw doesn't change, but the frequency does. As such, Sony doesn't need to guess at the worst case scenario in terms of power draw in games going forward.
With the new flexible frequency strat the GPU is capped at 2.23 GHz, which translates as 10.3 teraflops of gaming power.
The CPU on the PS5 is capped at 3.5GHz.
Cerny now moves onto the final "finding new dreams" principal part of his presentation.
He stresses the importance of audio in games. The goals for audio on PS5 was, firstly, great audio for all gamers, secondly, audio dimensionality, and thirdly presence and locality (as in, you are actually there in the game). How do we know where sound is coming from in the first place, though, Cerny asks. Volume changes and phase shifts is the answer.
Cerny now talks about computation complexity and the PS5's custom 3D audio unit. Tempest 3D AudioTech is the official name for the idea, and the hardware is called the Tempest Engine. It has SPU-like architecture and GPU parallelism, meaning it can deal with complex audio processing and, crucially, can generate 3D audio affects for all gamers, regardless of how they are listening (headphones, soundbar, TV speakers etc).
And, that was it. So, we didn't see the PS5 unveiled but we did get some very detailed information on the PS5's SSD, GPU and custom 3D audio processor. Hopefully we will get more information, as well as that all important what the console actually looks like, sooner rather than later.
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