The next generation of console wars - Playstation 5 stream

[williamcll]

Update: In Denmark it will be sold for US$1,043/€935/£838/6989 Krone, releasing on December 1st 2020

 

Watch the stream here: 

 

Quote

Sony has broken its silence. PlayStation 5 specifications are now out in the open with system architect Mark Cerny delivering a deep dive presentation into the nature of the new hardware and the ways in which we should expect a true generational leap over PlayStation 4. Digital Foundry had the chance to watch the lecture a couple of days ahead of time and had the opportunity to talk to Cerny in more depth afterwards about the nature of the custom PlayStation hardware and the philosophy behind its design. As you'll appreciate when you see the deep-dive presentation released today, there's a wealth of new information about Sony's next-generation console plans here, and that's before we go really in-depth with the information Mark Cerny shared with us beyond the content of today's presentation. With that in mind, we'll be presenting our content in two chunks. Today, we'll be looking at what we've learned from Sony's video broadcast, and a little further on down the road, we'll go deeper and share even more detail around the central pillars. In summary, however, these are the core details covered today:

• The technical specifications of PlayStation 5 and its innovative 'boost' approach to core clocks;
• The features of the PlayStation 5 GPU;
• How the SSD helps deliver the next-generation dream;
• How Sony tackles expandable storage;
• Unprecedented 3D audio fidelity via the Tempest 3D Audio Engine.

What's exciting about this presentation is that Sony presents a vision for next-gen that recaptures some of the pioneering spirit of its early consoles by delivering state-of-the-art, exotic custom silicon with a razor-sharp focus on taking the gaming experience to the next level. But at the same time, the design embraces the developer-friendly ethos that proved so successful with PlayStation 4. The idea is that developers comfortable with the current generation hardware and can easily get to grips with the basics of PS5 and easily access the extra CPU, GPU and storage features before exploring the new features at their own pace.

Source:https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/ps5/

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-playstation-5-specs-and-tech-that-deliver-sonys-next-gen-vision

Thoughts: Very nice, but there's not much playstation games been attracting me the past few years, I will wait for the reviews.

[yolosnail]

I'm sick of hearing about sodding SSDs!

[porina]

I'll have to catch up later but I expect there'll be the inevitable comparison with the new XB.

[Doobeedoo]

So ok kinda what we expected so far though. Looking very good and how these new upcoming consoles are quite comparable is nice.

[suicidalfranco]

people still call it console wars when it's literally the same machine on just a different plastic box with a different OS?

[Age of 9394]

Is this video a 1 hour of Sony SSD Announcement?

[RejZoR]

Just watching the audio part and my god, we've had almost all of this 20 years ago on PC... It's funny how he talks about insane computation requirements for 3D audio and yet I can vividly remember how everyone (the people) was screaming how we don't need dedicated soundcards with powerful dedicated audio processors and how CPU's have enough computation power to do it alone. Aaaahm. Yeah, it was enough for crappy 32 sound sources and most basic vague 3D audio on bog standard Realtek chips maxing EAX 2 capabilities. Not for 128 audio sources with path tracing and all the effects attached to each path trace with output using some form of HRTF modeling that Creative top of the line soundcards were doing.

 

I hope Microsoft will pull head out of their own ass and give audio proper audio stack that can be properly accelerated. Either by dedicated audio processor on soundcards or via GPU.

[Pickles von Brine]

I like the fact they actually have an NVMe slot on their system unlike microsoft. Microsoft will have proprietary drives. 

[LostElric]

46 minutes ago, porina said:

I'll have to catch up later but I expect there'll be the inevitable comparison with the new XB.

Comparison from Engadget. They seem very similar with XB a bit ahead.

[Shogunluffy_1982]

The overclock ps5 version?

[xAcid9]

GPU@2.23Ghz? Really? Not "up to" 2.23ghz¹?  

 

¹ depend on >9000 variables

[Master Disaster]

1 hour ago, porina said:

I'll have to catch up later but I expect there'll be the inevitable comparison with the new XB.

I wouldn't bother unless you want 20 minutes of why HDDs are slower than SSDs, not an exaggeration either, 5 minutes in to the HDD speech I honestly went down stairs, prepared and ate food and when I got back he was still bangin on about seek times.

[porina]

38 minutes ago, LostElric said:

Comparison from Engadget. They seem very similar with XB a bit ahead.

Thanks, provides an interesting overview although I hope to dig deeper later in case of any nuances that may be over-simplified.

 

1 minute ago, Master Disaster said:

I wouldn't bother unless you want 20 minutes of why HDDs are slower than SSDs, not an exaggeration either, 5 minutes in to the HDD speech I honestly went down stairs, prepared and ate food and when I got back he was still bangin on about seek times.

I hope someone does a good writeup of what matters from it then. I'm curious about the shown storage bandwidth from the earlier posted table. Is that a PCIe 4 SSD, as the xb one looks more like an earlier gen amount of bandwidth. 

 

(Still sitting in an unrelated conference call... death would be a welcome diversion at this point)

[TetraSky]

48 minutes ago, LostElric said:

Comparison from Engadget. They seem very similar with XB a bit ahead.

Soooo It's the same console, nearly the same hardware and capabilities.... Just different OSes... Ok then... And people are still fighting over them. 

[LostElric]

I think the fanboi-ism comes from exclusives, not so much the hardware itself. For me personally i've always preferred playstations first part games over xbox but, with PC and MS releasing just about all of their first part games on PC i'll be content with Pc+PS5.

[Master Disaster]

7 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

Soooo It's the same console, nearly the same hardware and capabilities.... Just different OSes... Ok then... And people are still fighting over them. 

Did you notice that Sony seemed a little anxious about the fact the PS5 is basically an upgraded PS4? There was very little hype, emphasis on "iteration rather than new" and lots of middle manager bumpf. To me it felt like they were almost trying to tempur expectations which is odd considering the specs are a significant upgrade over the PS4. Heck on paper both the Series X & PS5 GPUs have more power than my 5700XT.

[RejZoR]

7 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Did you notice that Sony seemed a little anxious about the fact the PS5 is basically an upgraded PS4? There was very little hype, emphasis on "iteration rather than new" and lots of middle manager bumpf. To me it felt like they were almost trying to tempur expectations which is odd considering the specs are a significant upgrade over the PS4. Heck on paper both the Series X & PS5 GPUs have more power than my 5700XT.

Given how much emphasis there is on internal I/O (specifically MEMORY+SSD), ray tracing capability with path tracing HRTF capable audio, it's hard to call it a small upgrade. Not to mention it runs latest Zen2 and RDNA2. Compared to Jaguar processor that was last gen even on its release...

 

They've removed most bottlenecks that required developers to be creative when designing a game instead of just allowing them to make things they want instead of things console needed to run well. Which I can see as great way to speed up development which is already lengthy, expensive and complex as is with modern titles.

 

Since this will be the new I/O standard on consoles, I think porting of games to PC's with crappy HDD's on budget systems will be problematic. SSD's are cheap, but people still run them. But we've seen problems with that already, for example NFS 2015 had cars falling through maps because physical layer of the level loaded too slowly on HDD's and players fell through. It's bad game design, but shows a realistic problem.

[3rrant]

Everybody freakin out about the TFs being lower on Reddit and socials are really a show of incompetence.

 

PS5 is a custom, different, unique approach to gaming hardware. The Xbox is.. literally a boxed PC with much smaller tweaks (in comparison). Next generation is really gonna be interesting going forward.

 

It's funny also how people are undereacting at the SSD like "we've always had SSDs in PCs!". We do, and they mostly sucks. This looks to be pretty revolutionary for once, at least for gaming.

[suicidalfranco]

so as said same machine only different box and OS.

PS5 probably set at a lower clock on both GPU and CPU because it will have a smaller box and therefore has more thermal constraints

[Guest]

Those 36 CUs are going to make this console way cheaper than the xbox. And with 2.2GHz it's probably not going to lag that much behind in performance. Also the non-proprietary storage is going to be more attractive. If you look back at the last generations it's pretty easy to see which console is going to sell better:
Xbox 360 was cheaper than the PS3 and outsold it for the longest time
PS4 was cheaper than the Xbox One and outsold it
 

[Belgarathian]

I really like the expandable NVMe storage in the PS5, but the Xbox looks like it's going to runaway with the power crown. Given that this gen is all about 4k gaming, it's concerning how little power the PS5 appears to have on paper. I guess we'll have to wait to see what optimisation magic they can pull, or if they meant CTR at 4k/60.

[3rrant]

45 minutes ago, Medicate said:

Those 36 CUs are going to make this console way cheaper than the xbox. And with 2.2GHz it's probably not going to lag that much behind in performance. Also the non-proprietary storage is going to be more attractive. If you look back at the last generations it's pretty easy to see which console is going to sell better:
Xbox 360 was cheaper than the PS3 and outsold it for the longest time
PS4 was cheaper than the Xbox One and outsold it
 

Yet, Sony won 3 of the 4 generations it was in, and the only one "they lost" was against Nintendo Wii (7th generation) not against the 360 which they outsold.

Xbox was always the underdog, and most likely will always be.

[Fnige]

4 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

so as said same machine only different box and OS.

PS5 probably set at a lower clock on both GPU and CPU because it will have a smaller box and therefore has more thermal constraints

Ps5 actually has a higher GPU clock speed

[suicidalfranco]

51 minutes ago, SlimyPython said:

Ps5 actually has a higher GPU clock speed

and lower cu count

[Fnige]

8 hours ago, LostElric said:

Comparison from Engadget. They seem very similar with XB a bit ahead.

This one shows more in some areas, though is missing a few

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