Playstation 5 [PS5] [Release November 12 2020]

[almighty15]

Why the complaining about BC? Digital Foundry have shown 45-50% more performance purely from GPU architecture improvements alone when comparing Tflop to Tflop so even if they drop GPU clocks down to match PS4 games should run significantly better.

And for games that run fine at the boosted clock speeds the difference should be huge.

The one thing I am disappointed about is no mention of PS3/PS2 running on PS5 like rumors had suggested, the prospect of PS5 being able to play every generation of PS games was enough to make a grown man cry.

The audio is a nice touch as certain areas of games have been lackluster this generation and audio is one of them, although I would of preferred to see a dedicated physics processor as that area has also sucked this generation.

PS5's party trick could very well be it's I/O performance, if the system can indeed load the amount of data Cerny was claiming it can when the player moves the camera then that is a game changer, finally the end of 'pop-in'?? Oh and PS4 games should also load instantly too.

This current generation has been so boring from an architecture point of view that it's nice to have some decent differences to talk about and discuss.

 

[mrcorbo]

Finally got a chance to look at the presentation and I'm really impressed with the super-fast SSD tech (I mean we knew it was coming, but still!) and happy to see audio get some love. If you are invested in the PlayStation platform, I see no reason to jump ship. The platform will be likely be close enough visually that you won't be giving up much. On the other hand, the way they are realizing the audio is not to my preference. I don't like to isolate myself when gaming (this it one of the reasons I haven't taken to VR more). I don't want to have to wear headphones to realize one of the tentpole features of the platform, so the fact that even effective headphone audio is going to be a WIP over the early life of the system makes me think that the audio support I actually want, surround sound, as 3rd on the list isn't coming until way down the road.

As of now, I don't think I'm getting this at launch. I'll wait for the features to mature and the library of titles that exploit them to grow large enough and then re-visit.

 

[upnorthsox]

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

Or in other words, the ps5 at 2.23Ghz is at such the high end of the power curve the even a few % difference in clocks can have a major effect on your power usage and since you are power throttled you will never see any speed near that top of the curve.

 

[MrFox]

Or in other words, the ps5 at 2.23Ghz is at such the high end of the power curve the even a few % difference in clocks can have a major effect on your power usage and since you are power throttled you will never see any speed near that top of the curve.

Cerny said the gpu will spend the majority of the time at that speed. So yes, it means you will see the speed at that top 2.23 the majority of the time.

 

[Boxercide]

This sounds like the Switch's boost mode, where during times the GPU isn't being stressed, the CPU can grab extra power.

 

[almighty15]

Or in other words, the ps5 at 2.23Ghz is at such the high end of the power curve the even a few % difference in clocks can have a major effect on your power usage and since you are power throttled you will never see any speed near that top of the curve.

Where are you getting your data from regarding how much it will actually drop clocks?

Cerny also said that the GPU clock has been capped so where are you getting your data regarding your comment about 2.23Ghz being at "high end of the power curve" - I would really like to see these numbers and analyse them myself.

 

[BRiT]

I think Cerny said 'a few percentage' drop and something about 10% power drops somewhere in during the video presentation. Someone may have even directly noted the timestamp in this thread.

I refuse to watch the entire video again to find the exact verbiage and timestamps.

 

[almighty15]

I think Cerny said 'a few percentage' drop and something about 10% power drops somewhere in during the video presentation. Someone may have even directly noted the timestamp in this thread.

I refuse to watch the entire video again to find the exact verbiage and timestamps.

He said a 10% drop in power would only result in, and I'm quoting Cerny here - "a couple of percent reduction in frequency"

So I'm curious as to why people are assuming it's going to be a massive fall off in frequency, a 'couple' is generally seen as 2, so a 2% drop in frequency will still give slightly over 10Tflops.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

I don't want to have to wear headphones to realize one of the tentpole features of the platform, so the fact that even effective headphone audio is going to be a WIP over the early life of the system makes me think that the audio support I actually want, surround sound, as 3rd on the list isn't coming until way down the road.

I don't want to use headphones either, I want to use my home theater setup most of the time. However, I don't think surround speakers will be put 3rd on the list.
It should be way harder to achieve decent spacialization using stereo speakers or even #gasp# soundbars than a 5.1 setup. Odds are the console will even support object-based Dolby ATMOS at launch.

His proposal of using pictures of the head+ears to alter the HRTFs to your own physique is similar to Creative's SXFi method that has been getting praise everywhere. That seems really cool.
And the fact that they're using a full 64 ALU RDNA CU with stripped down caches just for the sound shows they're putting real effort in it, unlike what we saw in previous generations.

Where are you getting your data from regarding how much it will actually drop clocks?

Here:

When that worst case game arrives, it will run at a lower clock speed. But not too much lower, to reduce power by 10 per cent it only takes a couple of percent reduction in frequency, so I'd expect any downclocking to be pretty minor

 

[BRiT]

He said a 10% drop in power would only result in, and I'm quoting Cerny here - "a couple of percent reduction in frequency"

So I'm curious as to why people are assuming it's going to be a massive fall off in frequency, a 'couple' is generally seen as 2, so a 2% drop in frequency will still give slightly over 10Tflops.

So it's 'a couple' and not 'a few', like 2% vs 3%-4%?

I guess they were initially expecting larger drops like how the different "boost" modes for PC components work? I know a good part of the earlier comments were from people doing "live reactions" while they were watching the video and maybe had not gotten to the part where it was quantified? Not everyone was watching the video presentation live.

*shrug*

For reference here's the different percentages and what ranges it would apply to (roughly):

2% = 2.18 - 2.23
3% = 2.16 - 2.23
4% = 2.14 - 2.23​

 

[RobertR1]

I think Cerny said 'a few percentage' drop and something about 10% power drops somewhere in during the video presentation. Someone may have even directly noted the timestamp in this thread.

I refuse to watch the entire video again to find the exact verbiage and timestamps.

Power draw scales with frequency.

Running sustained boost will generate notable heat due to package thermal density.

For me, the sustained clocks of the console when both cpu and gpu are competing for power draw will be ingesting. Mainly because I’ve spent way too much time in the last year overclocking and fine tuning every component.

 

[mrcorbo]

I don't want to use headphones either, I want to use my home theater setup most of the time. However, I don't think surround speakers will be put 3rd on the list.

Cerny did this exact thing, though. Headphones with 5 HRTF's now with continual development, virtual surround from stereo speakers up and running and being tweaked and surround sound setups "later".

 

[PSman1700]

For me, the sustained clocks of the console when both cpu and gpu are competing for power draw will be ingesting. Mainly because I’ve spent way too much time in the last year overclocking and fine tuning every component.

Me too, been clocking the hell out of my 920 D0 and C0 systems, higher clocks do cause problems, everything from memory, qpi paths and everything in and between,
For the PS5 though, we will have to wait and see what the lowest bclk is, i doubt if it's so little that they would even bother doing dynamic clocks, could aswell have clocked say

4% = 2.14 - 2.23

, or something like that.

 

[BRiT]

I'd be interested in comparing the various audio approaches, but that's an insane number of comparisons -- 5 HRTFs on PS5, the existing 3 on OneX [Dolby Atmos for Headphones, DTS X for Headphones, and Windows Sonic for Headphones], and then the native headphones without HRTFs for 10 comparisons.

 

[Deleted member 7537]

 

[iroboto]

Power draw scales with frequency.

Running sustained boost will generate notable heat due to package thermal density.

For me, the sustained clocks of the console when both cpu and gpu are competing for power draw will be ingesting. Mainly because I’ve spent way too much time in the last year overclocking and fine tuning every component.

I do wonder if this will be annoying for a developer to juggle.
You're already having to fit in as much as you can into your game, leveraging your hardware to the maximum. Then when you finally do get the most out of the available cycles of CPU or GPU, you suddenly take a hit and you're playing a weird balancing game.

Sounds like this could be a point of frustration in the future.
It's like this:

but now instead of just dealing with bandwidth, now you have the same thing but with available performance.

Won't be fun to juggle, so I expect variable resolution with early cutoff to deal with it.

 

[wco81]

No release date or price announced right?

Any demos?

All the discussion of RT, will be interesting to see if the launch game demos show RT RT.

 

[BRiT]

No release date or price announced right?
Any demos?

All the discussion of RT, will be interesting to see if the launch game demos show RT RT.

Correct - no release date.
Correct - no price announced.
No game demos.

But, before today Sony had said "Holiday 2020".

 

[chris1515]

https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2110892/

It must be the absolute max at 2.23, they probably tried 2.26ghz (i was told over a month ago already). They must have adjusted to lower.

Now maybe people learn that people who really have the info would never tell anyone about it.

Wrong I had the SSD compressed speed 8 GB/s, never gave the real speed because my friend asks me to not do it and I just tell more than 7 GB/s. After I heard by him the PS5 was less powerful than Xbox Series X on paper but I was thinking it will be worse.

EDIT: And Matt (mod at era) told the PS5 and Xbox Series X are within 15% of each other. He was knowing.

 

[chris1515]

I think I prefer the PS5 hardware because of the potentially much faster load times and the potentially better audio solution (microsoft didn't say much about theirs other than it did "3D" audio). I can't say I'm impressed with the storage expansion situation though. 850GB or whatever it is, is not enough. If they allow nvme expansion with off the shelf drives, I have no idea how they'll keep the same performance profile. They should have some automated system that manages moving things back and forth between between the internal drive and expansion based on frequency of access or something. When you go to load something off the expansion it takes the least accessed game off the internal and swaps.

They explain it precisely. You need a SSD as fast at least and PCIE 4 but NVME SSD has only two queue of priority against 6 queues in the custom PS4 controller, it means you need faster SSD probably 7 GB/s. They will arrive end of the year.

Curious to see what will be the cheapest solution for an expansion. 7 GB/s PCIE 4 SSD will probably be very expensive.