“Road to the PlayStation 5”: the main thing from the presentation

Initially, Mark Zerny was preparing this lecture for GDC 2020, so what was told is primarily devoted to game developers, and not ordinary players.

Processor – 8-core AMD Zen 2 at 3.5 GHz

    Graphics core – 10.28 teraflops based on AMD RDNA 2

    RAM – 16 gigabytes of GDDR6 at a speed of 446 gigabytes per second

    Memory – 825 gigabytes SSD format NVME at speeds from 5.5 to 9 gigabytes per second

    Drive – 4K UHD Blu-Ray.

Developers most of all asked for the transition to SSD. To expand the memory, any NVMe SSD is suitable, but it is advisable to take verified Sony so that there are no problems with downloading content. Switching to SSD will reduce the size of the game due to the uselessness of using duplicate files. Installing patches on the PS5 will be instantaneous, as opposed to the long on the PS4. In general, SSDs on the PS5 are 100 times faster than the HDDs on the PS4. The PS4 has a large amount of RAM idle because it holds a lot of content that can only be potentially used. The PS5 has such a fast data transfer rate that all 16 gigabytes of RAM will be used for the game. Simply put, the PS4 holds 30 seconds of the closest gameplay in RAM, and the PS5 holds 1 second.

So far, Sony cannot confirm that all PS4 games will be available on the PS5 release, but the first tests are very positive. Problems arise because the new console is too fast, so you need to check each project separately for compatibility. Unfortunately, nothing was said about compatibility with PS3, PS2 and PS1. Ray tracing will be used not only for the visual component, but also for “three-dimensional sound”. This will be a very important part of the console, for which a separate chip is used – Tempest 3D AudioTech. Zerni, using the example of Dead Space, said that if then we only roughly understood where the signal source is, then now we would precisely determine where it comes from.