Sony’s Mark Cerny has gone in-depth with the PlayStation 5’s hardware, although he still hasn’t actually shown us a picture of what the PS5 looks like.
A few weeks ago, Sony revealed the specifications for the PlayStation 5. Surprisingly, the PS5 was capable of fewer computations than the Xbox Series X, but that’s not necessarily the whole story. One Crytek engineer has said that the PS5 is the superior console simply because it’s much easier to develop for.
To go further into this idea, Digital Foundry teamed up with Eurogamer and noted Dana Carvey look-alike Mark Cerny in order to bring us the full scoop on what makes the PS5 tick.
For the full and very technical details, head on over to Eurogamer for their coverage. Here, we’re just going to give you the juicy bits, starting with a novel power and temperature control system. This system, according to Cerny will ensure that every PS5 is identical when it comes to CPU power and heat, which is apparently a problem when it comes to game development and home consoles. The system actually simulates ahead of time what power the PS5 will need to play games and determines what cooling this power draw will require. The net result is an extremely consistent behavior that eases coding requirements for developers.
Another big deal for the PS5 is the solid-state drive. With an effective bandwidth of 8-9 GB/s, this means you could theoretically install new games in mere seconds rather than minutes or even hours. Of course, this installation speed is more dependant on your internet connection than anything else, but it’s still incredibly fast for a hard drive.
The PlayStation 5 also uses a new ID-based system or file encoding that’s designed for speedy memory reading. This means ultra-low latency when reading the drive–as little as 1 m/s, to be precise. This means you can read data off the drive fast enough to load it into the game without first needing to store in the system’s RAM. This frees up resources to do other, more impressive things.
Things like 3D Audio. The PS5’s “Tempest Engine” actually simulates a three-dimensional environment where the game’s sound is produced. This means the PS5 can actually account for things like the speed of sound when a gunshot is fired from a mile away.
We’ll get a full teardown of the PS5 soon, which might actually give us an idea of what the PlayStation 5 will look like. For more, check out the video above.
Source: Eurogamer
