Playstation 5 [PS5] [Release November 12 2020]

[Shifty Geezer]

That was interesting, especially reading the comments on here, at the same time as I was looking at the stream.

My initial impression is that Sony looked at what will make a better game experience now that graphics (within a reasonable price and power envelope) has plateaued somewhat, while MS just went as high and wide in every direction they could.

Though possibly true, the realistic size of MS's SOC shows high and wide isn't that expensive, so why did Sony do something different? We have to wait and see what the final console BOMs are to know if there's some good rationale for the decisions or not.

 

[techuse]

From what I understand, its like current PC cpu and gpu where they will basically will almost aways boost themselves up, almost never limits their peak at the stock clock.

If its anything like current PC GPUs its going to be quite a variable experience depending on your silicon lottery draw and what part of the world you live in.

 

[anexanhume]

Really want to know more about the cache scrubbers and coherency engine.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

They’re basically the same, one will run at imperceptibly higher res. The other will load games and levels imperceptibly faster.

We saw XSX load State of Decay 2 in about seven seconds. Cerny mentioned PS5 will boot games in a second. I still find this mind-boggling and difficult to believe. I won't be fussed at ~10 second loading times on my XSX (which I am getting), but PS5 will be borderline magical if this I/O system delivers on Cerny's promise.

 

[szymku]

The goal was to present PS5 as well thought and refined design, that is better than "simplistic" approach of XBSX.
Which of course is not the case. MS design is similiary well thought and also quite a bit faster.
But maybe not fast enough to make it significant. Cant wait to see the prices and the games, because Sony exclusives could set the bar quite high.

Also WTF are cache scrubbers, apparently exclusive to ps5? Will they make any diffrence?

 

[novcze]

I have no clue in regards to boost clock or reliability, I defer to experts on here, but it seems nobody on here likes Cerny's "boost solution" to make the TF gap smaller on paper.

it's actually clever, they designed power supply and cooling around known number ... if one lives in hotter enviroment fan will be louder, but no change in game performance

 

[Esrever]

We saw XSX load State of Decay 2 in about seven seconds. Cerny mentioned PS5 will boot games in a second. I still find this mind-boggling and difficult to believe. I won't be fussed at ~10 second loading times on my XSX (which I am getting), but PS5 will be borderline magical if this I/O system delivers on Cerny's promise.

Games are probably not optimized for SSD loading for now and the SXS demo is just to show improvement over the base HDD. Sony's quote is probably the best case scenario where the game doesn't even have to fully load to get playing and then most stuff is streamed in. Not something possible to demo right now. Will see more when people actually tests this but I have a feeling both will perform pretty similarly even with 2x the bandwidth quoted for the PS5 considering the 20x improvement from moving from HDD to SSD isn't remotely close to loading the game in a 20th the time.

 

[AzBat]

Really want to know more about the cache scrubbers and coherency engine.

Infinite Improbability Drive?

Tommy McClain

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Sony's quote is probably the best case scenario where the game doesn't even have to fully load to get playing and then most stuff is streamed in.

This is the thing. If Sony said this I would be dubious, but Mark Cerny said this.

 

[hughJ]

As great as the shift to SSDs are, I have to keep reminding myself that historically each console generation were seeing something akin to 10x in memory capacity and bandwidth. The SSDs here are as much a compensation for the lack of significant memory increase as they are an improvement over base storage speeds. Being able to load or stream games faster is neat, but it doesn't exactly get my imagination stirring about the size and complexity of visible and interactive environments.

 

[orangpelupa]

If its anything like current PC GPUs its going to be quite a variable experience depending on your silicon lottery draw and what part of the world you live in.

It'll only throttle to power. Not temperature. At least according to cerny.

So probably it will simply shut itself off when overheat instead of throttling. Like ps4

 

[Deleted member 11852]

As great as the shift to SSDs are, I have to keep reminding myself that historically each console generation were seeing something akin to 10x in memory capacity and bandwidth. The SSDs here are as much a compensation for the lack of significant memory increase as they are an improvement over base storage speeds.

What would you do, for example, with 60Gb of RAM?

 

[techuse]

It'll only throttle to power. Not temperature. At least according to cerny.

So probably it will simply shut itself off when overheat instead of throttling. Like ps4

Silicon degrades over time requiring higher voltages and increasing power draw.

 

[fellix]

As great as the shift to SSDs are, I have to keep reminding myself that historically each console generation were seeing something akin to 10x in memory capacity and bandwidth. The SSDs here are as much a compensation for the lack of significant memory increase as they are an improvement over base storage speeds. Being able to load or stream games faster is neat, but it doesn't exactly get my imagination stirring about the size and complexity of visible and interactive environments.

The storage subsystem has been stagnating for the longest time, so naturally the emphasis for the next generation is there. Adding more RAM beyond some point is getting much more expensive and still could't compensate for the slow storage and large memory sizes tend to require reduced speeds, hitting mostly the GPU scaling.

 

[JPT]

Though possibly true, the realistic size of MS's SOC shows high and wide isn't that expensive, so why did Sony do something different? We have to wait and see what the final console BOMs are to know if there's some good rationale for the decisions or not.

That is what I do find interesting, I assume that Sony could have taken the same approach as MS.
But also if we just stupidly assume that the BOM costs is exactly the same for the PS5 and XSX, who made the better system for the better games.
More omph always works, other times it's better to work smarter than harder. I am looking forward to see if Cerny manages to pull another rabbit out the bag and have Betmax win over VHS this time (yes, stupid comparison, but was meant as fun more than anything)

 

[orangpelupa]

it's actually clever, they designed power supply and cooling around known number ... if one lives in hotter enviroment fan will be louder, but no change in game performance

Now you make me suspect sony will be using the same shitty TIM like ps4 pro and it will sound like a jet taking off again... Until I replaced the TIM by myself with better quality ones.

Although cerny does mention the failure of ps4 cooling solution...

Hmm. Please don't make ps5 sounds like ps4 pro...

 

[pTmdfx]

The different is, in most consoles, the clocks are conservative so they had headroom. Having boost clock removes headroom and it will hit that problem so much sooner.

"Boost" is a blanket marketing term for DVFS, and you can use whatever algorithm on whichever set of parameters you care to drive DVFS. The behavior you are describing is indeed problematic, but only when you have an algorithm that would aggressively exhaust thermal headroom & exceed the fixed power budget to ramp up frequency opportunistically, aka your auto-overclocking "Precision Boost Overdrive" boost.

If they want to have consistent performance regardless of how the cooling system performs, they can choose to drive DVFS solely with power consumption (which is apparently the case according to the Eurogramer article), while sufficiently provision the cooling system for decay. Does this sound familar? That's basically your old days' boost without the PBO kind of boosting...

 

[orangpelupa]

Silicon degrades over time requiring higher voltages and increasing power draw.

Then my nightmare will be granted: ps5 louder than ps4 pro in just a few years.

Nooooooooo

 

[JPT]

We saw XSX load State of Decay 2 in about seven seconds. Cerny mentioned PS5 will boot games in a second. I still find this mind-boggling and difficult to believe. I won't be fussed at ~10 second loading times on my XSX (which I am getting), but PS5 will be borderline magical if this I/O system delivers on Cerny's promise.

Yes, will that 7s vs 1s be a game changer in game design? Maybe, something we will only see in Sony 1st party, but like Wolfenstein ushered in a new game type/design, will instant loading change games or is it just 7s vs 1s yawn? Looking forward to find out.

 

[hughJ]

since adding more RAM beyond some point is getting much more expensive

Yeah, I'm not really complaining about their design choices as much as I am observing that the cost of dram (or perhaps transistors in general) has plateaued.