PlayStation
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2020–2023
52:45 · 17M views · Mar 18, 2020
PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny gives a deep dive into the PS5's architecture, covering its SSD, I/O, audio and design goals. He explains how removing bottlenecks shapes future games.
HN treats it as required viewing for understanding the PS5's SSD and architecture beyond raw specs.
10 comments from Hacker News
I can really recommend this tech talk regarding PS4 and PS5 hardware by their lead hardware architect this video some really interesting topics related to what kind of performance they wanted as a baseline and how to optimize to make the PS5 do what it currently does... like no other platform. a $700 console that: - outputs 4k / HDR (upscaled from lower native res. ofc) - renders games steadily at 30 / 60fps - no hitches, framedrops - always records your gameplay - live video sharing of stream with PS friends - live streaming to youtube - updates of games being installed - downloads of games/data all simultaneous, instant game switches, quick loading times. the experience cannot be replicated with a 1k gaming PC, not even a $2000 machine. They really delivered a device which is imho, more than just "an AMD gaming PC with a custom GUI and some DRM" would have loved to have widescale keyboard/mouse support, as playing Far Cry with a controller is frustrating at best. And keyboard/mouse support is in hands of the game dev if they want to support it or not.
Yes, a lot of people commenting here should really go watch the talk Mark Cerny gave [0]. It's clear there's no "big technological breakthrough". SSDs are great but have been around for a while already, we simply had to wait for the technology to mature enough. What we are seeing is that we can't just keep slapping better CPUs and GPUs to the machines, because the improvements nowaday are not that impressive anymore, so at least for the PS5 they have switched and started focusing on the architecture , removing bottlenecks, removing major pain points, and using additional hardware to handle tasks like compression and freeing resources for other purposes. Some people might say these improvements happen because they were lazy before and never focused properly on dev needs and bottlenecks and the specific needs of game development. I partially agree, but the SSDs really don't just improve disk speed, they allow a completely different set of architectural optimizations. [0] this video
IMO required viewing for any dev to form a more informed opinion on the SSD tech. Cerny talks about it fairly practically. Starting point on SSD: this video for about 20 minutes
I believe "time to 200" is a reference to "time to triangle," which Playstation architect Mark Cerny and others have used to describe the amount of time it takes to get a game engine up and running on a new console to the point where it can render its first triangle [1]. You can see him talking about time to triangle on various Playstation consoles here [2] (and if you have the time, it's definitely worth watching the entire talk). [1] [LINK] [2] this video
The PS5s operating system and even how they package game files had to be developed from the ground up to realize these gains. There’s a good technical talk about it from one of Sony’s engineers. this video