Playstation 5 [PS5] [Release November 12 2020]

[temesgen]

Really thinking about the bc situation with PS5. The load time situation may very well make playing legacy games too much of a chore.

It will be like going from using a washing machine to hand washing your clothes. I'm starting to question the value of bc, especially if the cu count was a function of compatibility.

Probably could make a very good argument that the paradigm shift of no load times is sufficient to not look back at all.

 

[Mitchings]

Cerny mentioned a hardware tear down near the beginning, I wonder when this will be.

 

[chris1515]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1240396893815013376

https://twitter.com/x/status/1240329690629509120

On Twitter the dev are very excited by the PS5 SSD technology.

 

[3dilettante]

If its like the SPU, like Cerny claims then it will have automated caches but instead a programmer controlled local store which should be good for transistor size but a bit of a headache as they realised on the PS3. Maybe they'll abstract it away this time. I can see it working better as audio processor vs the generalised Cell because audio is inherently stream based no?.

Using DMA means being able to explicitly organize data and instructions into batches large enough that the transfers are efficient. I guess I'm not sure what they would do to abstract that sort of explicit scheduling and batching.
I suppose without relying on the L0 cache, then a big portion of the load/store and texturing area of the CU could be reduced or removed. In both the Jaguar and Cell cases, the SIMD widths are quite narrow, and the number of separate threads concurrently executing could be higher than a single RDNA CU with 2 SIMDs.
It's plausible that there's more throughput and not much less independence if we assume audio didn't get that many SPEs or CPUs in practice, though.

Maybe more needed to be changed. There still needs to be enough local memory of some sort, there may need to be more cross-lane or permute operations with high-speed implementation, and other parts of the CU depend on scalar or instruction caches, which have some nice points for flexibility versus hanging them off the same pool.

 

[Betanumerical]

Using DMA means being able to explicitly organize data and instructions into batches large enough that the transfers are efficient. I guess I'm not sure what they would do to abstract that sort of explicit scheduling and batching.
I suppose without relying on the L0 cache, then a big portion of the load/store and texturing area of the CU could be reduced or removed. In both the Jaguar and Cell cases, the SIMD widths are quite narrow, and the number of separate threads concurrently executing could be higher than a single RDNA CU with 2 SIMDs.
It's plausible that there's more throughput and not much less independence if we assume audio didn't get that many SPEs or CPUs in practice, though.

Maybe more needed to be changed. There still needs to be enough local memory of some sort, there may need to be more cross-lane or permute operations with high-speed implementation, and other parts of the CU depend on scalar or instruction caches, which have some nice points for flexibility versus hanging them off the same pool.

Are we sure that its 1CU I'm not sure I remember them saying an exact number.

 

[temesgen]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1240396893815013376

https://twitter.com/x/status/1240329690629509120

On Twitter the dev are very excited by the PS5 SSD technology.

Matt's comment is pretty important, unless the SSD performance is relatively close third parties aren't going to be able to effectively use it. It would be prohibitive to design games with no load times simultaneously with a version that did have wait times. The game design would default to the LCD.

 

[3dilettante]

Are we sure that its 1CU I'm not sure I remember them saying an exact number.

I think he just said a compute unit, and that it had throughput similar to the PS4's Jaguar cores. That looks like something a CU could easily do.

 

[goonergaz]

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

I'm unsure they would lose the space of 16 CUs for those, surely that would seem a very poor trade of for the cost?

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.

Based on? Cerny seemed confident about his solution.

 

[Xbat]

Matt's comment is pretty important, unless the SSD performance is relatively close third parties aren't going to be able to effectively use it. It would be prohibitive to design games with no load times simultaneously with a version that did have wait times. The game design would default to the LCD.

If it has a dramatic effect it will boosts first party sales by differentiating them from other games hence boosting console sales.

 

[Nesh]

Matt's comment is pretty important, unless the SSD performance is relatively close third parties aren't going to be able to effectively use it. It would be prohibitive to design games with no load times simultaneously with a version that did have wait times. The game design would default to the LCD.

Yes it is. Unless Sony manages to sell the PS5 like hotcakes. Then we might see it being implemented on the PS5 with compromises on the X

 

[Karamazov]

So if i understood correctly the ultra fast data transfert rates will allow to feed a lot more detail into player's point of view at any given time, bye bye textures/assets streaming issues and visible LoD transitions ?

 

[Nesh]

So if i understood correctly the ultra fast data transfert rates will allow to feed a lot more detail into player's point of view at any given time, bye bye textures/assets streaming issues and visible LoD transitions ?

Thats exactly what I understood from Cerny's presentation. Thats a huge deal.
10GB with traditional streaming vs 10GB with super fast access to data should make a whole difference. Thats a potential next gen leap right there. You have more information displayed at the player with the same memory

 

[iroboto]

As posters above mentioned.. Cerny didn't say only 100 will be available, he provided an example in which the top 100 PS4 games were tested and nearly all of them worked.

Presumably firmware may need to be updated and/or individual games patched to work fully without bugs. Considering the low-level APIs used for PS4 development, this is perfectly reasonable. Hopefully Sony stay on top of it.

Right, yea I came back late and tried to catch up quickly. Got my info from Polygon as opposed to watching the event and the article did not do a good job conveying that.

that being said, still not good that they think most of their 100 ranked games were tested with Boost and it won’t be all of them working with boost. Though it is comforting they have legacy bC for their titles.

 

[chris1515]

So if i understood correctly the ultra fast data transfert rates will allow to feed a lot more detail into player's point of view at any given time, bye bye textures/assets streaming issues and visible LoD transitions ?

Yes I heard about highest LOD details further away, perfect quality texture. From an assets point of view at 4k it will be nearly perfect.

 

[Kaotik]

Right, yea I came back late and tried to catch up quickly. Got my info from Polygon as opposed to watching the event and the article did not do a good job conveying that.

that being said, still not good that they think most of their 100 ranked games were tested with Boost and it won’t be all of them working with boost. Though it is comforting they have legacy bC for their titles.

Where on earth is this "Boost BC mode" and "Legacy BC mode" stuff coming from?
Cerny definitely talked nothing of the sorts, the "Boost" he refers to during the BC is PS5 SoCs high Boost clocks, which indicates that they don't have it running at lower clocks for BC.
They expect most of the Top 100 PS4 titles (by playtime) to be playable on PS5 on launch. Not "Playable in Boost BC mode" or anything else, just playable on PS5.

 

[orangpelupa]

now im confused. Just how many boosts are in PS5?

 

[Kaotik]

now im confused. Just how many boosts are in PS5?

CPU and GPU both have boost clocks, max 3.5 and 2.23 GHz, base/minimum clocks unknown for now.
That should be all the boosts there is.

 

[Xbat]

Where on earth is this "Boost BC mode" and "Legacy BC mode" stuff coming from?

I suppose from the GitHub leak where they did testing with different number of CUs active and different clock speeds.

 

[iroboto]

Where on earth is this "Boost BC mode" and "Legacy BC mode" stuff coming from?
Cerny definitely talked nothing of the sorts, the "Boost" he refers to during the BC is PS5 SoCs high Boost clocks, which indicates that they don't have it running at lower clocks for BC.
They expect most of the Top 100 PS4 titles (by playtime) to be playable on PS5 on launch. Not "Playable in Boost BC mode" or anything else, just playable on PS5.

So PS5 supports 2 types of legacy BC. Legacy meaning it runs the same clock speeds as the legacy device. PS5 native mode is to run older BC code at PS5 speeds. This is where they tested the 100 titles and some of them had issues, but they are confident that most of them will be running for launch on PS5 Native mode.

 

[PSman1700]

Unless of course their exclusives look so good they eclipse the Series X games, then I’ll have to readjust my judgement.

I expected sony to show something, esp if they had something that would eclipse what the competion has shown. Maybe in a seperate video/youtube?
Curious to see the final design of the console.