Playstation 5 [PS5] [Release November 12 2020]

[Nesh]

I am watching the presentation now and there a re a few things that make me wonder if the PS5 indeed provides significant advantages with some decisions.

In the past RAM loaded information that is not visible or experienced by the player. This time around memory may have only doubled, but the SSD speeds means that what is loaded is exactly what's in front of the player, seeing and experiencing. The SSD can serve as both a super fast scratch disk but also as a way to optimize fully the use of RAM. This is where these custom controllers and chips are probably assisting this. The positive thing is that the developer need not worry about these chips. So assuming the ultra best case scenario where 16GB are fully used thanks to those SSD speeds just for the sake of the argument, that will be 16GB of information in front of the player, not data waiting to be accessed. Thats a lot more information at every frame that could have been accessed if we were still stack with slow drive speeds. So its like having more than 16GB of RAM in actual results compared to what we could have in the past.

Thats a super big deal.

Is the difference in speeds between Series X and PS5 enough to provide a tangible advantage? Based on Cerny's description it probably compensates for the lower bandwidth in memory

The other good thing is that he expects developers to gain familiarity with the hardware in less than a month. Thats below PS4 and PS1 levels. Which may probably eliminate concerns where the developer may have to fiddle with frequency speeds and such....hopefully...

The other thing that makes me wonder is that, he says its easier to fill 36 CUs in parallel with useful work than fill 48 CUs , so I wonder if this was a good choice along with higher clocks than going higher CU count.

It is interesting that their frequency approach maintains constant power and shifts power from CPU to GPU if it is partly unused through Smartshift. Is this something that happened before or something also in Series X?

I wonder how 3D audio between PS5 and Series X differs. They dedicated a lot of time for sound in the presentation so it is a big deal for them.

 

[disco_]

Huh? By saying nothing?

By doing last minute chip revisions and clock increases.

 

[function]

Why do they need that when adequate NVMEs can be used?

For one thing you can just whip the expansion card out of the XSX and take it round to your chums house for a gaming session. You can probably even just quick boot into the same three games you most recently playing in seconds.

And for another, there aren't any PS5 compatible drives at the moment. At launch you can have a 2TB XSX. PS5 is capped at 825GB for the near future.

Edit: personally I like / prefer the idea of installing additional NVMe drives like in PS5, but I can still see some plusses for the XSX setup.

 

[PSman1700]

Cerny said it hits that clock the vast majority of the time. Or are we back to saying he's lying about everything?

Read the DF article.

 

[Globalisateur]

What is disappointing is that only 100 PS4 games will be playable at launch (with no guarantee that others game will be available, only promises).

So they made a Frankenstein GPU (that will probably consume as much watts or even more than Xbox with its 20% more powerful GPU) in order to play 4% of PS4 games ? What a waste.

This reminds me a lot of Wii U. But at least Wii U could play all Wii games, not 4% of them.

 

[Nesh]

What is disappointing is that only 100 PS4 games will be playable at launch (with no guarantee that others game will be available, only promises).

So they made a Frankenstein GPU (that will probably consume as much watts or even more than Xbox with its 20% more powerful GPU) in order to play 4% of PS4 games ? What a waste.

This is reminds me a lot of Wii U. But at least Wii U could play all Wii games, not 4% of them.

Also no PS2 or PS1 or PS3 support?

 

[Kaotik]

Also no PS2 or PS1 or PS3 support?

PSNow perhaps?

 

[AlNom]

I think the real world difference in BW available for the GPU will be larger than the theoretical total system BW.

For the PS4 there was the famous graph showing real world BW was well below theoretical, and that CPU access to memory disproportionately hurt real world BW for the GPU, due to CPU access being prioritised.

( ~10GB/s of CPU use is costing about ~30GB/s for the GPU)

So 560 / 448 = 1.25, a 25% advantage for the XSX on paper.

But assuming your memory controller is working in the 80%-of-theoretical ballpark, and that these fast new CPUs still have prioritised access that was costing, say 80 GB (pulled outta my ass) from the GPU in a stressful scene, the BW difference could turn out to be:

(560 * 0.8 - 80) / (448 * 0.8 - 80) = 1.32.

Obviously this is just an example, but the actual BW advantage for the GPU is larger than the raw bandwidth figures indicate. Plus a wider bus is supposed to allow for more efficient scheduling and higher effective utilisation and the XSX has that too.

The X1X "only" has 50% more BW than the Pro, yet there are games where the X1X has a 70%+ performance advantage. I'm guessing that in BW limited areas of games that XSX will be 30%+ faster than the PS5.

It'll also be interesting to know the CPU/GPU cache amounts as well in order to gauge bandwidth penalties.

 

[Tkumpathenurpahl]

For one thing you can just whip the expansion card out of the XSX and take it round to your chums house for a gaming session. You can probably even just quick boot into the same three games you most recently playing in seconds.

We don't know whether or not that will be the case with the PS5 yet. The M2 drive may well be easily accessible and hot swappable. Hopefully it is. Sure M2 is physically bigger than the XSX card, but it's still smaller than a single Blu-ray case.

And for another, there aren't any PS5 compatible drives at the moment. At launch you can have a 2TB XSX. PS5 is capped at 825GB for the near future.

There aren't any PS5 compatible drives at the moment, true. But there also isn't a PS5 at the moment.

Who knows what's around the corner. PlayStation branded expansion drives may well be announced when Sony does a less techy reveal of the physical console, the DualShock 5, services etc

 

[Pressure]

The other thing that makes me wonder is that, he says its easier to fill 36 CUs in parallel with useful work than fill 48 CUs , so I wonder if this was a good choice along with higher clocks than going higher CU count.

We clearly see this when comparing GCN with RDNA, with the latter being much easier to get high utilisation from.

 

[disco_]

I really didn't expect to have my cake and eat it too with the storage.

5.5GB/s raw
22GB/s uncompressed
10% better compression than LZ
Custom 12ch controller

That's 2.3x raw and 4.6x compressed over xbsx, and they still managed to allow standard nvme expansion. It's not clear how they will deal with the missing QoS queues.

He said the gpu is expected to operate at 2.23ghz most of the time. We are missing real world metric here. What's the average?

Also said they get better performance from fewer CUs at higher clock for equivalent ALU TF sum, because of better occupancy. And he was a strong believer of higher clocks for that reason. (so this was a design goal from the start) Again, missing real world metrics.

It explains why it's complicated to compare performance.

I'm seeing people quote 2% variance in clocks. Not sure if that's legit.

 

[dobwal]

What is disappointing is that only 100 PS4 games will be playable at launch (with no guarantee that others game will be available, only promises).

So they made a Frankenstein GPU (that will probably consume as much watts or even more than Xbox with its 20% more powerful GPU) in order to play 4% of PS4 games ? What a waste.

This reminds me a lot of Wii U. But at least Wii U could play all Wii games, not 4% of them.

I imagine they will work on it like MS did for XB1 and the list will grow over time.

 

[Pressure]

We don't know whether or not that will be the case with the PS5 yet. The M2 drive may well be easily accessible and hot swappable. Hopefully it is. Sure M2 is physically bigger than the XSX card, but it's still smaller than a single Blu-ray case.



There aren't any PS5 compatible drives at the moment, true. But there also isn't a PS5 at the moment.

Who knows what's around the corner. PlayStation branded expansion drives may well be announced when Sony does a less techy reveal of the physical console, the DualShock 5, services etc

Proper PCIe 4 NVMe controllers are coming soon that can fully saturate the bandwidth offered. The current Phison E16 controller is not able to do that.

 

[PSman1700]

I'm seeing people quote 2% variance in clocks. Not sure if that's legit.

If it would be, why complicating things with 2%. 2.23ghz is very high, even 2000mhz was already seen as 'aha'. Most likely clocks between those two.

 

[Kaotik]

I'm seeing people quote 2% variance in clocks. Not sure if that's legit.

It's not, Cerny just said that to drop 10 % power you just need to drop couple (or was it few) % clocks

 

[disco_]

We don't know whether or not that will be the case with the PS5 yet. The M2 drive may well be easily accessible and hot swappable. Hopefully it is. Sure M2 is physically bigger than the XSX card, but it's still smaller than a single Blu-ray case.

The little cards for xsx could be like those surface pro cards. They also started introducing these little guys on the left, last year,

 

[Deleted member 7537]

And now we have to wait 3 more months for games...

One thing Sony has done wrong is aiming this event at casual/average pea... gamers. I get that after GDC got cancelled they needed to release this info but I would have change the format given the target audience had changed. I can't say I like Jim Ryan leading things here.

 

[BRiT]

I'm seeing people quote 2% variance in clocks. Not sure if that's legit.

That 2% difference was just enough to make a difference in who had to donate to the site, despite the spirit of the bet actually being won by Proelite.

 

[Tkumpathenurpahl]

What is disappointing is that only 100 PS4 games will be playable at launch (with no guarantee that others game will be available, only promises).

So they made a Frankenstein GPU (that will probably consume as much watts or even more than Xbox with its 20% more powerful GPU) in order to play 4% of PS4 games ? What a waste.

This reminds me a lot of Wii U. But at least Wii U could play all Wii games, not 4% of them.

That's not what was said. They said they've tested it with the 100 most played games and most will play just fine come the launch of the PS5.

We don't yet know what that will result in. Maybe 98 of those 100 played absolutely fine, and maybe that will translate to 98% of all PS4 games playing absolutely fine.

Or maybe it means 51 of those 100 PS4 games play just fine, and everything else in the library falls on its arse.

Life of the Black Tiger will probably not fare well in this transition.

 

[Rockster]

Has anyone gotten a TMU or ROP count?