Little is missing from the launch of PlayStation 5, the new generation console that, together with Xbox Series X, will introduce very important aspects such as SSD and Ray Tracing into the console world. Here in a single article everything, we know so far.
The PlayStation 5 presentation has been fragmented into various parts. Sony has diluted the announcements on the various features throughout the whole year, which is why it is not immediate to disentangle the amount of information, so we decided to group them into a single article, so as to have the clearest vision possible. The new consoles represent a very important change for the world of technology and, as happens with every generational leap, they will revolutionize the way we conceive and develop video games. There is much more besides a new type of operation for SSD and Ray Tracing, as we will see later in the article.
Design
The presentation of the PlayStation 5 design surprised everyone, so aggressive is the aesthetic of the new console. Sony has given the impression of wanting to focus on one aspect for which the rival Xbox Series X proves weak (the same members of the Xbox team have joked about it, comparing it to a refrigerator).
PlayStation 5 Standard and Digital Edition
Sony has shown the design of the new PlayStation 5 and unveiled the arrival of two versions, a standard with Blu-Ray player and a version called "Digital Edition", without a player.
The design of the console is slender and vertical (you can also put it horizontally), very different from that of the Xbox Series X. If the new Microsoft console can be said to resemble a computer, for the new Sony proposal we continue to focus on a look from real console. White on the sides and with a central black insert, PS5 will certainly not go unnoticed.
PlayStation 5 vs Xbox Series X
Our analysis could only start from the central SoC of the consoles, that is, the chip that integrates the CPU and GPU part. In terms of CPU, both consoles have opted to adopt 8 cores based on AMD's Zen 2 architecture, that of the Ryzen 3000 processors. This is an adequate choice, which guarantees a solid base for the years to come. After the rapid increase in the number of cores in the PC sector, with the mainstream chips that have gone up to 16 cores, it is clear that for several years the perfect ratio will be presented by the CPUs with 8 cores such as the Ryzen 7 3700X, processor to which the CPU part of the two consoles seems to come very close.
Before talking about the frequencies, let's move on to the GPU. Numerically speaking, Microsoft has the advantage: 52 Compute Unit RDNA 2 against 36, for a power that the house of Redmond indicates equal to 12 TFLOPs and Sony to 10.28 TFLOPs. We will have to understand how much they will actually be able to squeeze more developers in terms of graphics from this 1.8 TFLOPs of difference. From a functional point of view, in addition to supporting ray tracing in hardware, we expect the two consoles to offer a similar set of features, with technologies such as Variable Rate Shading and more.
Frequencies are an interesting point of confrontation: the Playstation 5 chip operates at variable frequencies and relies on a chip power budget allocation system to get to pull the GPU up to 2.23 GHz, a very high clock, where the Xbox Series X GPU operates stably at 1825 MHz, focusing more on the Compute Units. It will be interesting to understand, especially on the PS5 front, how long the maximum frequency can be maintained. As for the processor, here the difference in frequencies in play should not make much difference, although it is interesting how Microsoft has pointed out a double frequency with and without Simultaneous Multi-Threading. We will see in practice what it will entail.
Technical specifications
Cerny focused on the architectural changes that became necessary to support the new SSD and the greater bandwidth made available, which required the development of a special controller, and on the new Tempest Audio Engine, which will allow you to manage positional audio with characteristics in some ways unprecedented in the world of video games using ray-tracing techniques. But let's see what the CPU and GPU specs of PlayStation 5 are before going into the other speeches.
CPU and GPU
Like Xbox Series X, PS5 also has an SoC consisting of a CPU and a GPU. The CPU is based on AMD's Zen 2 architecture, in the form of 8 physical cores with SMT for a total of 16 threads. The frequency, variable, can go up to 3.5 GHz. According to Cerny, we are faced with a maximum and "typical" frequency, that is, it will be maintained for most of the time, but in certain limit conditions, it could drop.
The custom version of the AMD RDNA 2 GPU on the PlayStation 5 has 36 Compute Units (CU) operating at the maximum frequency of 2.23 GHz, which translates into a theoretical maximum performance of 10.28 TFLOP/s. These are therefore slightly lower specifications than those announced by Microsoft for the Xbox Series X (i.e. 52 Compute Units and 12 TFLOP/s). At the same time, it is important to remember that the performance of an RDNA 2 computing unit far exceeds that of a PS4 or PS4 Pro CU, based on a previous architecture.
In fact, the transistor density of an RDNA 2 processor is 62% higher than a PS4 CU, which means, in terms of the number of transistors, that the set of PlayStation 5's 36 CUs equals 58 PlayStation 4 CUs. Additionally, the PS5 CUs operate at a higher clock rate, than both the PS4 CUs and the Xbox Series X CUs.
An important difference with respect to the past generation concerns the fact that the clock frequencies of the CPU and GPU vary according to a power budget linked to the thermal limits of the cooling system. What do you mean? Although at first glance it seems that the performance of PS5 is directly related to the thermal margin, it is not so. Sony has been very clear: all PS5s process the same workloads at the same performance level in any environment, no matter what the outside temperature is.
"It's a totally different paradigm. Instead of running at a constant frequency and letting the consumption vary based on the load, we essentially work at a constant consumption and let the frequency vary according to the load," explained Cerny. Everything is based on the hardware operating data recorded by an internal thermal monitoring system. The system analyzes the CPU and GPU loads and adjusts the frequencies accordingly.
In PS5, the internal monitoring system analyzes CPU and GPU workloads and sets clock frequencies accordingly. Rather than adjusting based on the temperatures encountered on the die, observe the activities that GPU and CPU are doing and set the frequencies on that database, "which makes everything more deterministic and repeatable," Cerny said in the presentation. This system, in combination with the technology SmartShift of AMD, PS5 allows to optimize the operation of CPU and GPU, and assign them to parallel workloads poorly when used in such a way that "can squeeze a few more pixels".
It's a very fascinating idea, and it's unclear if it can also be replicated on the Xbox Series X. Developers will probably have to be aware of the potential spikes in power consumption that the system will cause because they could affect clock rates and performance. However, at the same time, in certain scenarios Sony may be able to make the most of the GPU, making it run at very high clock frequencies and extracting more performance than a traditional RDNA 2 computing unit.
From a certain point of view, it is an opposite approach compared to that of Microsoft with Xbox Series X: Redmond is betting on the number of CU while Sony has returned to the old approach that sees the clock frequency in command. "The performance in terms of TFLOP/s concerns the computational capacity of the vector ALU" explained Cerny during the presentation. "This is only part of the GPU, there are many other units, and those other units work faster when the GPU frequency is higher. " In other words, Cerny means that a smaller GPU can function in an optimized and more agile way.
Returning to architectural optimizations, a new block known as Geometry Engine will offer developers unparalleled control over triangles and other primitives and easy optimization for geometry breakdown. The functionality extends to the creation of "primitive shaders" that look very similar to the shader meshes of the Nvidia Turing architecture and the upcoming AMD RDNA 2 GPUs.
Finally, even if Cerny did not talk about technologies such as machine learning support or variable-rate shading, it is good to underline that PS5 supports the hardware acceleration of ray tracing through what it called "Intersection Engine" within the GPU.
SSD
This aspect is very important in the new generation. Cerny has shown tables that show that the bandwidth of the PS4 hard disk was limited between 50 MB/six 100 MB/s (depending on whether the data was on the internal or external part of the disk) while reading, while with the 'SSD of PS5 we get up to 5.5 GB/s thanks to 12 internal channels and four PCIe 4.0 lines that connect it to the central SoC. Thanks to a few things we talk about later, the actual bandwidth reaches 8-9 GB/s in the system.
This is higher bandwidth than that made available by PCIe 3.0 units on an M.2 PC interface (3.5 GB/s) and lower than future PCIe 4.0 units with a 7 GB/s bandwidth, and slightly higher than current M.2 PCIe 4.0 models.
The access time to the unit will be instantaneous, against the 2-50 thousandths of a second of the PS4 mechanical disk. These limitations translated into compromises for video game developers, as Cerny explained. A game level requires frequent access to the disc to load textures and polygonal models: if they are not fast enough the developer is forced to stop the game experience, to give the "breath" to the hardware, for example by blocking the player in an elevator while content is loading.
In PlayStation 4, therefore, the data stored on the disk gives the feeling of being distant and difficult to use. For certain gaming purposes, it is necessary to store this data in the 8GB of GDDR5 RAM memory that PS4 equip. Cerny said that in that memory the developers must deposit the necessary data for the next 30 seconds of gameplay. On PS5, however, the SSD can be understood almost as much as RAM in terms of access latencies and bandwidth. This will mean that only the data needed for a second of gameplay will need to be loaded into RAM. On SS5 are well space 16 GB of memory type GDDR6.
According to Cerny, all this translates into lower loading times and the absence of loading screens from one level to another. It also allows developers to be freer in designing game levels, with fewer elevators and long corridors that are unnecessary for gameplay. Since there may be other bottlenecks between the game's source code and the SSD, Sony has worked hard on the controller to optimally manage the shift between disk content and system memory. PS4 uses the compression format known as zlib, while PS5 will use Kraken, a compression format created by RAD Game Tools 10% more effective than the previous one. This translates into the possibility of being able to store 10% more of the game content on the Blu-Ray disc or on the SSD, which is not negligible from the point of view of a developer. Kraken is now the standard of the video game industry.
Then a Custom I/O Unit was inserted between the controller and the system memory, equipped with a DMA controller (Dedicated DMA Controller) with a power equal to two Zen 2 cores, which has the aim of removing bottlenecks and immediately send all ready content on disk to system memory. Inside the I/O unit, we also find two co-processors dedicated to the process of input and output operations, one dedicated specifically to the SSD, the other to the memory for the mapping and remapping jobs that the developers.
Of the consistency engines, then, assist co-processors: basically, make sure to bring in the GPU data only when they actually serve the GPU. Developers don't have to worry about any of these operations, just compress the data and indicate what information they want to be decompressed. The whole process of loading from disk to system memory occurs invisibly in the eyes of the developer.
External storage
This is a topic that is currently being dealt with too quickly by Sony. In addition to the possibility of connecting external hard drives or SSDs to the USB ports, expansion of the internal storage will be possible via NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs designed for PCs. The problem is that currently, the SSDs on the market are neither fast enough to keep up with the internal solution nor validated by Sony for operation on the console.
Mark Cerny also talked about a slot created in PS5 for M.2 drives and the fact that many current PCIe 4.0 SSDs have large heatsinks that may not favor their insertion into these slots. We will, therefore, have to wait for the arrival on the market of new faster NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs and hope that the manufacturers submit them to the Sony certification system, but also to understand how the housing will be made.
Tempest Audio Engine
Not only new generation graphics for the Playstation 5, but also a first level audio sector, because games are not just looked at, but also heard. Mark Cerny, during his conference, regretted the lack of attention of the developers in this regard, especially with the current generation.
Cerny praised the Cell processor installed on the PS3, which with its SPU managed the best audio, but also the Playstation VR viewer, capable with its audio unit to decently support about 50 sound sources. With PS5 Sony wants to change the rules of the game and to do so has developed a custom audio chip called Tempest Engine with support for hundreds of audio sources, reproduced at very high quality.
The Tempest Engine, more precisely, is nothing more than a Compute Unit of a redesigned AMD GPU, to which the cache has been removed leaving only the DMA transfers, just like an SPU of PS3, and the possibility of exploiting the vector units of the Compute Unit. According to Mark Cerny, the chip guarantees the same SIMD power and bandwidth as all eight PS4 Jaguar cores put together.
Tempest Engine's capabilities are based on the concepts of presence and location. While the rain reproduced in current games is nothing but a unique and not very complex sound, thanks to the Tempest Engine the new PS5 will be able to reproduce all the nuances: it will be like being in the middle of the shower, thanks to the simulation of the sound of the single drops contact with the surrounding environment.
The custom audio chip will also be able to accurately track where objects are located. To accurately simulate positioning, Sony had to generate a table of values called Head-related Transfer Function (HRTF), which is a transfer function related to the head, also known as an anatomical transfer function. It is basically an answer that distinguishes the way an ear receives sound from a point in space.
This table, for a better result, should be generated individually, but since it is not possible to do it at the moment, Sony created it based on the head and ear physiology of a hundred people, so as to get to five settings, among which users will choose during configuration. In short, the Tempest Engine was born to revolutionize gaming audio and although to fully enjoy it, high-end audio products will certainly be needed, Sony believes that a pair of good quality headphones will guarantee an experience never "heard before".
Cooling system
The work on the dev kit made it clear the difficulties that the Sony engineers had to face in order to adequately cool PlayStation 5. In fact, it seems that the famous V-shaped dev kit of PlayStation 5 led Sony technicians to use aggressive solutions for its cooling system with the steam chamber and 6 fans
This is confirmed by a new patent uploaded on the portal of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which shows some details of the functioning of this cooling system (source: LetsGoDigital, the same one that first showed the dev kit).
According to the patent, in the two "wings" of the dev kit, there are a total of 3 fans used to cool the APU and another 3 to cool the power supply. Apparently, Sony uses a steam chamber "advanced liquid cooling system" to cool this dev kit. The liquid inside a steam chamber is heated by the heat emitted by the CPU to then evaporate and be dissipated uniformly in the heat pipes that complete the cooling system.
Other reports make it known that Sony would spend "a few dollars" on the cooling system of each PlayStation 5 unit built, or more than the average: a system with these characteristics usually requires less than a dollar for the production of its own system. of cooling.
DualSense and PS5: the password is immersion
At first glance, the new DualSense seems to recover most of the features of its predecessor (DualShock 4), with the most visible changes mainly concerning the design. The most relevant innovations are in fact the least visible and concern a haptic feedback system, which will find new implementations during gameplay in future games available on PS5.
Developers, therefore, have the task of making their titles compatible with DualSense touch sensors. The latter, also integrated in the adaptive triggers L2 and R2, will give the player different sensations based on the game played on PS5, such as "the slowness of driving a car in the mud" or "the tension of a bow while shooting an arrow" explains Hideaki Nishino.
Regarding the design, Sony would have changed the angle of the aforementioned rear triggers and modified the handle, improving their ergonomics. Improvements also as regards the weight, significantly reduced, and the battery life, which this time can be recharged through USB Type C. We also note the presence of a new button, Create, which replaces the Share button to introduce new options dedicated to the creation and sharing of content.
Another new feature of DualSense concerns its integrated microphone, which will allow players to communicate with their friends without having to use a headset. However, this is a feature indicated purely for quick conversations: for prolonged chat sessions, Sony still recommends the use of a pair of headphones.
The final design of the controller, obtained after numerous concepts and hundreds of mockups, highlights a double coloration (black and white) and a repositioning of the iconic DualShock 4 lightbar, which illuminates the two sides of the touchpad here.
PlayStation 5 games
Spider-Man: Miles Morales of Insomniac Games is expected the Christmas holidays, after which here is the discounted return of Polyphony Digital with Gran Turismo 7. However, an exit date or period has not yet been communicated. One of the games to arouse a good impression, perhaps also because it is shown more than others, was certainly Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart, with a constantly evolving game world with instant loading thanks to the console's powerful SSD, many characters and screen movement, reflections in ray tracing and much more. Again, no release date has been announced.
A game that we recommend keeping an eye on, at least at first glance, is Square Enix's Project Athia, an exclusive PS5 that looks like an action and adventure title. Annapurna Interactive's Stray will also debut in 2021, in which we move in a world populated by robots who behave like humans. In the trailer, everything is shown following the deeds of a nice cat who wanders the alleys of the city.
Another apparently interesting title is Housemarque's Returnal. They take on the role of what appears to be an astronaut, who ended up on an alien planet certainly not friendly. A science fiction action-adventure game, with a third-person view and good graphics.
Sumo Digital has unveiled a certainly less disturbing game, Sackboy: A Big Adventure, a platform featuring LittleBigPlanet's Sackboy stuffed toy. A game to be evaluated is Lucid's Destruction Allstars, with gameplay set in an arena where strange machines driven by crazy characters collide against each other in total chaos.
During the event, space was dedicated to Oddworld: Soulstorm, a platform adventure created by Oddworld Inhabitants in which the protagonist must, in addition to shooting, solve numerous puzzles. Tango Gameworks showed Ghostwire: Tokyo, IO Interactive announced the arrival of Hitman III in January 2021 and Guerrilla showed Horizon Forbidden West, a follow-up to Horizon Zero Dawn.
During the event Arkane Studios showed Deathloop, which will arrive in the Christmas holidays and which will be a temporary exclusive PS5, then later it will also arrive on Xbox Series X. In 2021 we will see instead Resident Evil Village.
PlayStation 5 will also see a remake of Demon's Souls, developed by Bluepoint Games and Japan Studio. The list then continues with Kena: Bridge of Spirits, Goodbye Volcano High, Jett: The Far Shore, Godfall, Solar Ash, Bugsnax, Little Devil Inside, Astro's Playroom and an NBA 2K21 trailer was also shown. Not shown but also announced Tribes of Midgard (Gearbox Publishing/Norsfell) and The Pathless (Annapurna Interactive/Giant Squid). Finally, in 2022 Pragmata will arrive, a game that looks graphically impressive.
Retro-compatibility
Cerny said the company's backward compatibility tests produced "excellent" results. In addition, "we recently tested the top 100 PlayStation 4 titles ranked by game time and we expect almost all of them to be playable on launch on PlayStation 5. "
During the presentation, Cerny showed a slide that highlights three modes of execution on PS5: "Native Mode" for games natively developed for PlayStation 5; "Pro Legacy Mode" for titles originally optimized for PS4 Pro and "PS4 Legacy Mode" for those that do not benefit from PS4 Pro optimization. It seems that only these titles are taken into account for backwards compatibility. In the past, Sony had said that PS5 will guarantee backward compatibility but has never clarified in detail how it will do it.
Cerny then said that one way to enable compatibility with previous versions would be to insert the previous generation chipset into PS5, as has been done with some PS3 models. Based on the Cell processor, PS3 was architecturally completely different from PS2, and Sony found itself having to insert the Emotion Engine chip into the first examples of the PS3 Cell processor. The downside is that this type of approach is "extremely expensive". "Even if the technology is different in terms of logic and feature set, the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro titles will be available in backward compatibility mode," concluded Cerny.
In the post-presentation hours, the Japanese company pointed out that "the vast majority of the more than 4000 PS4 games can also be used on PS5". Sony also expects that these games will run at higher frequencies on PlayStation 5, potentially with higher frame rates or higher resolutions. "We are evaluating the titles one by one to identify any problems that require developers' attention."
PlayStation 5: release date and price
According to Amazon FR PlayStation 5 will be available on the market from 20 November, at the price of 499.99 euros for the model that includes the Blu-ray player. Official confirmation from Sony is awaited.
Pre-order and Amazon
Sony PlayStation 5 already available on Amazon. The well-known e-commerce has published the product page of the two versions of PlayStation 5, even though campsites still have the words "Currently not available". There are no pricing details yet.
On the other hand, the times are absolutely ripe for the pre-order, which we believe can be enabled shortly. It should also be noted that the rival Xbox Series X does not yet have its page on Amazon.
Here's what you read in the description of PlayStation 5 on Amazon :
- Experience ultra-fast loading with an ultra-high-speed SSD, even greater involvement with support for haptic feedback, adaptive triggers and 3D audio and discover a new generation of incredible PlayStation games
- Be amazed by the incredible graphics and try the new features of PS5.
- Discover a deeper gaming experience with support for tactile feedback, adaptive triggers, and 3D audio technology
The product page of the Digital Edition version without optical drive is already online. In all likelihood, this will be the most expensive version of PlayStation 5 with the likely presence of a larger SSD, necessary for the need to install more content on the internal disk.
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