Playstation 5 [PS5] [Release November 12 2020]

[almighty15]

I think this is very exciting, Cerny put some real thought in to PS4 to ensure it was efficient and this is no different.

To the casual gamer in the street faster loads times on PS5 are going to be much more visible then the resolution difference.

There's also the whole back end efficiency, Nvidia cards out perform their AMD counterparts even though they have less tflops because Nvidia have a better balance between the back end and raw ALU performance.

Also using previous AMD PC graphics cards of the past:

HD7950 and 7970 at the same clocks the 7970 had a 4% performance advantage despite having 14% more shader cores.

Same story with the 290 vs 290x at the same clocks and the same story with Vega 56 vs Vega 64 at the same clocks, all previous AMD architectures have had poor scaling with the additional shader cores so I wouldn't discount PS5's faster clocks making up for a slight decrease in ALU performance in the real world. Especially as Cerny said keeping few ALU busy with work is much easier then keeping many busy.

And there's the matter of Series X.....or rather Series S........ most people think Microsoft has 2 next generation SKU's and they're focusing on the Series X for marketing as numbers sell (Why wouldn't they focus on the fastest SKU)

I do expect there is a Series S that's 6-8tflops that'll launch in order to justify the extra cost of the Series X.

This is base entry PS5, Sony could very well release a PS5 Pro in the next few years and have the fastest base and enhanced console of the generation.

Also PS5's 'smaller' SOC would likely lead to cheaper production costs so a lower selling point, imagine if PS5 releases at $399 and Series X at $499. That'll be 25% more cost for arguable a real world 'single digit' performance increase.

 

[Kaotik]

Also PS5's 'smaller' SOC would likely lead to cheaper production costs so a lower selling point, imagine if PS5 releases at $399 and Series X at $499. That'll be 25% more cost for arguable a real world 'single digit' performance increase.

Is it though? They have a lot of custom stuff on the I/O-department with a hefty load of SRAM to boot (exact amount not confirmed I think?), it might be surprisingly big portion of the SoC

 

[PSman1700]

I wish Sony would of stuck with sustained clocks. AMD use of "boost" is a horrible misnomer and mostly for marketing puposes. Most people equate "boost" with a performance increase when non boosted performance has been maximized. AMD "boost" clocks don't work that way.

Well you get a 9.2TF console, but the boosts do better for marketing.

I feel you're wrong, X to Pro has bigger (and more) advantages.

3.5Ghz max boost, versus 3.8Ghz without SMT, 3.6ghz with. 12.1TF sustained vs 10TF max boost. Memory bandwith is alot more on XSX too, which gives rather huge advantage as function explained. The extra GPU performance provides more RT perf too. In raw perf for GPU, X had 1.8TF more then pro. We could have a similar situation, maybe.

There's also the whole back end efficiency, Nvidia cards out perform their AMD counterparts even though they have less tflops because Nvidia have a better balance between the back end and raw ALU performance.

Thought that too, but someone here explained NV clocks are higher then standard given.
There is no real evidence of a 2 SKU launch, the XSX chip isn't that big (360) as previously thought, the console might very well compete directly with the PS5 in price, all things considered.

 

[chris1515]

When the stream started and Jim Ryan was stood there, stating that "unfortunately [they] had to cancel this year's GDC talk" I almost threw my telly out of the window. Then he introduced Cerny and I stopped frothing at the mouth.

Pretty disappointing really. They haven't ballsed it up to the extent that I won't be buying it, but it seems to be more of a PS4Pro than a PS4.

I'm not keen that they've gone cheap, but given that we're on the verge of another global recession, maybe going cheap will work in their favour. If so, we have confirmation that Sony are responsible for COVID-19.

SSD

The SSD tech is welcomed. It bodes well that he mentioned it taking roughly half a second to spin the camera, and that being adequate to feed memory ~5GB of new data. I can see that being taken advantage of to realise some very dense, very varied environments and enemies.

I'm curious to see how the Kraken decompression block fares, given that he stated it can decompress up to 20GB of data depending on how well it compresses. Specifically, I'm curious to see just how often that best case scenario comes to pass. I reckon it'll be somewhat similar to the performance gains of RPM, in that around 10% of textures will compress quite that well.

825GB strikes me as an odd number, but the fact that it'll be easily expandable means I don't much care. I upgraded the storage on my PS3 and PS4, and by the time I got my PS4Pro, I was able to plug in an external 4TB HDD. Hopefully the M2 drives will be pretty much hot swappable. I quite like the idea of having a couple of different drives with my more played games on one, and less played games on another. Most played on internal SSD of course.

Audio

I like playing games with surround sound headphones and I'm pretty happy that it's going to be a hardware feature. Hopefully they'll let me use any headphones I want, not just some PlayStation branded ones. Time will tell.

I don't quite get why these HRTF profiles are something to give a toss about. Everyone has different ear canals etc yes, but they're also the ones that you use every moment of your life. You're used to hearing with them, used to positioning invisible sources with them, and I struggle to believe that your brain can't make sense of 3D audio because you haven't let the Babel fish's less useful cousin have a rummage around.

I've yet to try the tech out, so maybe I'm talking out of my arse.

Backwards compatibility

They've tested the top 100 most played games, and they expect most to be playable at launch. What the fuck does that mean? Are they classifying 51 out of that 100 as "most?"

Hopefully any issues are minimal and easily patched out. We're looking at a minimum of 7 months before launch, so I would hope that Sony are working with developers to iron out any troubles.

Or maybe it's just a legal thing, and all games seem to work fine most of the time, but they can't risk instances of mis-selling.

I'm curious about the custom block for audio processing, given that Cerny was comparing it to the Cell's SPE's. Could it be the case that this customised CU (or customised CU's) have scope for emulating the SPE's of the Cell? Maybe not to the extent of just inserting your disk, but more akin to the XBoxOne method?

POWER

It doesn't really deserve to be capitalised, as it really isn't all that powerful. Maybe. Cerny seemed to choke a bit when stating that CU count and TF count aren't all that important. Like he didn't believe it himself. And why would he? He's an engineer (honest and precise) not a salesman (deceitful and manipulative.)

The 2.23GHz GPU clockspeed is all well and good, but the variability makes me a little nervous. It's probably the best generation ever in which to take this approach, given the abundance of dynamic resolution scaling that we've seen take off in the current generation, but I'm still unsure of what this will mean in practice.

We'll see, but I don't want to get one of the shit ones, and be stuck with a console that only reliably hits 2.1GHz at the same rate that an ideal console hits this touted 2.23GHz. There are plenty of unknowns, and so I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but my gut says that I would've preferred 40CU's at a reliable 2GHz.

44CU's per chip, with 4 deactivated for yields, then leaves open the possibility - with otherwise defective chips - the combination of deactivating a further 4 CU's and lowering the clockspeed to PS4Pro levels, for use in PSNow data centres.

If this results in a PS5Pro in a few years' time, and they can take the same approach of butterfly wings for the GPU, and clocking both halves higher, then I can accept this as a smart decision: games will be built around a dynamically changing GPU frequency, so will automatically see resolution/quality boosts (or resolution/quality stability.) Right now though, it seems a little bit lacking.

It's the bandwidth that disappoints me most though. I'm an HBM fanboy, so high bandwidth makes my nipples tingle. And for Sony to go with quite pedestrian GDDR6 for a meagre 448GB/s bandwidth bothers me. The 528GB/s in the GitHub gospel was a lot more appealing. It is quite funny though that the only appealing part of the gospel is the part that didn't come to pass.



Given that, as he was discussing the matter, the screen next to him displayed the example of 7GB/s, I suspect that such speeds will be required for compatible drives, which will then run below their bandwidth (and therefore temperature) limit.

The memory bandwidth is the problem of the console on my side. Other things seems ok for a 399 dollars consoles.

 

[psurge]

As far as boost goes, I understood Cerny to mean that performance will be consistent in the sense that for a given load, frequency will vary in the same way across all PS5 units, regardless of the ambient temperature / console age. If that's correct, it seems smarter than the Xbox "fixed clock no matter what solution" - buyers don't have to worry about getting golden samples, but at the same time, clock speeds can ramp up (conservatively, such that all units are able to do the same, regardless of conditions) when power usage for a particular load is low.

However, that sounds like a policy that might also be implementable for the XSX, so I'm not sure it's much of an advantage for the PS5.

Caveat: I may have misunderstood completely. Also I'm not a game dev - there may still be good reasons to prefer the fixed clock approach that I am unaware of.

 

[chris1515]

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.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1240333695858270209

People of RAD tworking on the Kraken solution seems to say it is the goal.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1240341184867758085

 

[Nesh]

You know, whatever the decisions behind the hardware - ultimately if PS5 launches at a competitive price, which Cerny alluded to a couple of times, it is what it is.

The real problem I can see with my “business goggles” is that MS this time around simply seems more prepared.

With this presentation, Sony looked quite unprepared, which is quite an insane notion considering how long they’ve had to prepare the hardware firstly, and then a reveal.

It just doesn’t scream “Sony” like it would have, where everything was pretty much on point.

This semblance of unpreparedness at a corporate level is quite striking to someone like me who has been around the block a few times.

I think the reason we feel this way is because MS aimed higher and achieved it in yet unknown price.
Looking at the PS5 design, excluding the presence of MS, it is still well thought, especially if they managed a good price. Now if MS achieves almost parity with price with a more powerful device, then certainly Sony lost the mark.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Also PS5's 'smaller' SOC would likely lead to cheaper production costs so a lower selling point, imagine if PS5 releases at $399 and Series X at $499. That'll be 25% more cost for arguable a real world 'single digit' performance increase.

It remains to be seen if the smaller SOC (smaller contact area with cooling device) at a higher GPU clock will necessitate a more expensive cooling solution than the XBSX. We'll have to see if Sony has felt the need to push the power envelope on their SOC past the knee of the power efficiency curve as AMD has had to do with their high clocked graphics cards or whether they've been able to keep it low enough that it's still relatively power efficient.

Regards,
SB

 

[Scott_Arm]

I think the reason we feel this way is because MS aimed higher and achieved it in yet unknown price.
Looking at the PS5 design, excluding the presence of MS, it is still well thought, especially if they managed a good price. Now if MS achieves almost parity with price with a more powerful device, then certainly Sony lost the mark.

Personally, I'd be more excited about the fast load times and ssd streaming performance of PS5 because everything else can be scaled easily. For couch gaming I just would want everything to load near instantly. But in the end, I can't wait to demolish both of these devices with an overpriced PC.

 

[function]

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

MS gave a figure for sram of 76MB - presumably various caches. Seems a lot, but then again I still have a plasma telly.

Hopefully Sony will spill some more beans. For example:

- minimum guaranteed GPU and CPU clocks (with and without HT)

- minimum guaranteed storage speed, regardless of load/temps.

- [Edit] how much memory reserved for the OS vs games

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

Meaning it will be one of the games to run??

 

[mrcorbo]

$399. From this all things flow.

 

[Panino Manino]

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 commented about this before, that this part may had been misinterpreted.
Maybe works like this.
When the PS5 is trying to behave like a PS4 to run PS4 games it works and runs normally.
The problem is when the PS5 is trying to behave like a PS4 Pro, in "boost mode". Because the clocks are much higher than the PS4 Pro this may cause problems for the game logic that isn't expecting so much more performance, so this need to be tested. Those 100 games are the games they tested to check this.
I hope I understood this right, but even so, no talk about PS3 and PS2 is really annoying. This console is very well able to emulate both. Will Sony let Microsoft shame them like this supporting even original Xbox games?

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

You know, whatever the decisions behind the hardware - ultimately if PS5 launches at a competitive price, which Cerny alluded to a couple of times, it is what it is.

The real problem I can see with my “business goggles” is that MS this time around simply seems more prepared.

With this presentation, Sony looked quite unprepared, which is quite an insane notion considering how long they’ve had to prepare the hardware firstly, and then a reveal.

It just doesn’t scream “Sony” like it would have, where everything was pretty much on point.

This semblance of unpreparedness at a corporate level is quite striking to someone like me who has been around the block a few times.

I'm not sure if unprepared is necessarily it, but either it's that or something close.

I lean towards "something close," which is one of two scenarios:

1. Sony and AMD's backwards compatibility efforts made, for whatever reason, anything but a 1:1 match in CU counts impossible.
2. There was a mandate from on high that the system be as small and cheap as possible, making 36CU's both the minimum and maximum, limiting bandwidth to a 256-bit bus, and making higher clocked GDDR6 non-viable.

Either of those scenarios has resulted in them sort of painting themselves into a corner. And since they can't just say "yeah, we fucked up a bit here" they were never going to be able to sound all that prepared.

If it's option 1, then fair enough, you have to just engineer around the limitations you're facing. And they've then got a fairly clear path to tread with the PS5Pro.

If it's option 2, I hope Sony face an uphill battle to match/surpass XSX sales and revenue. May their executives learn their lesson that cutting costs can lead to cutting profits too, as more people decide to play third party cash cows on the platform that didn't prioritise a small, cheap SoC with cheap memory on a narrow bus.

Everything else is fine, great even. But the more I think about the GPU and bandwidth, the more I'm baffled by their decision. If it was a two tier launch, then this would be a tremendous base console: bandwidth starved, but relatively cheap. But it's not, this is it.

We know ray tracing eats bandwidth, we know the 5700's 448GB/s bandwidth is already a limiting factor in its performance, we know the PS4Pro suffered disproportionately due to its bandwidth, and we know the PS2 was able to punch above its weight because of its crazy bandwidth. Yet they decided to go low on bandwidth?

The only aspect of the XSX that didn't impress me was it's relatively meagre amount of bandwidth, relative to its GPU. The PS5 somehow managed to do worse.

Edit: cohesion and structure.

 

[AbsoluteBeginner]

No way PS5 will be $399. It saves money only on SOC, which considering how highly clocked it is + cooling it requires, probabl isnt alot.

 

[anexanhume]

Well you get a 9.2TF console, but the boosts do better for marketing.



3.5Ghz max boost, versus 3.8Ghz without SMT, 3.6ghz with. 12.1TF sustained vs 10TF max boost. Memory bandwith is alot more on XSX too, which gives rather huge advantage as function explained. The extra GPU performance provides more RT perf too. In raw perf for GPU, X had 1.8TF more then pro. We could have a similar situation, maybe.



Thought that too, but someone here explained NV clocks are higher then standard given.
There is no real evidence of a 2 SKU launch, the XSX chip isn't that big (360) as previously thought, the console might very well compete directly with the PS5 in price, all things considered.

Careful, your agenda is showing.

 

[mpg1]

No way PS5 will be $399. It saves money only on SOC, which considering how highly clocked it is + cooling it requires, probabl isnt alot.

Well it saves some money on storage too...not sure how much 175GB of NAND costs...

 

[PSman1700]

For couch gaming I just would want everything to load near instantly.

I'm sure XSX games will load 'near instant aswell'.

Hopefully Sony will spill some more beans. For example:

- minimum guaranteed GPU and CPU clocks (with and without HT)

- minimum guaranteed storage speed, regardless of load/temps.

They could lower clocks perhaps, somewhat. We don't want red rings of death to happen.

I hope I understood this right, but even so, no talk about PS3 and PS2 is really annoying. This console is very well able to emulate both. Will Sony let Microsoft shame them like this supporting even original Xbox games?

MS does it in software, the emulation. If they go all the way back to OG xbox that's a rather good advtange as opposed to one gen.

 

[bgroovy]

No way PS5 will be $399. It saves money only on SOC, which considering how highly clocked it is + cooling it requires, probabl isnt alot.

It uses less NAND, has a less complicated mobo, has a smaller die size, uses more in house components like the SSD controller, and Sony has a general advantage in manufacturing and distribution. I think the PS5 delivers a bit more than I expected for $399, but that price is hardly out of the realm of possibilities.

 

[lefantome]

I am really disappointed in both the presentation and the hardware.

This hardware is supposed to represent a generational leap AND run native 4K games.

it feels that MS is miles ahead in heat dissipation technology and that Sony has invested too much on that super fast SSD. The SeriesX SSD is already way faster than what we have now, a x2 speedup is not going to be a big deal. That custom SSD must have been very expensive.
Then what about the next big thing: ray tracing? It was barely mentioned.

 

[BRiT]

Lets try to keep this thread about Sony Playstation 5, alright? So any general discussions about both systems, perhaps take the conversation over to the general thread or the technical?

General Thread: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...n-rumors-and-discussions-post-gdc-2020.61645/

Technical Thread: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...-technical-spin-post-gdc-2020-xbsx-ps5.61641/