PS5 thread

[fishbowlhead]

Seeing as we’ve now had some actual facts from Mark Cerny himself we can start a PS5 thread off.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18401209/sony-playstation-5-details-8k-graphics-ray-tracing-ssds-ps4-backward-compatibility

8K graphics.
3D audio, dedicated chip for this.
Super fast SSDs as standard.
Backwards compatibility with existing PlayStation 4 games on a hardware level, so fully bc.

More titbits in the interview.

[hudson]

I haven't even got 4K TV.

[fishbowlhead]

I haven't even got 4K TV.

Me either

[Family Fry]

Here’s the full interview piece with Mark Cerny about PS5.

https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-sony-next-gen-console/

[hudson]

We were like those old guys from the Muppets then

[Dogg Thang]

I imagine you'd need a cinema to justify the 8K.

[CMcK]

Ray tracing support is intriguing. I wonder if it’s via compute or fixed function hardware? AMD hasn’t publicly mentioned Navi having dedicated ray tracing support yet so it seems odd that it’s just been casually put into the spotlight by Sony.
It’ll be great to have a SSD on board but will it be the mass storage device or more of a scratch pad? If it’s the later it could mean maybe a bit less RAM than development teams would like.
I’m glad they’re embracing the positional audio too. It’s good on PSVR and the Atmos for headphones on Xbox 1 is a great feature that more people should try.

[Asura]

I imagine you'd need a cinema to justify the 8K.

[fishbowlhead]

Hopefully 4k 60fps will be the norm on PS5, though i wont hold my breath for any of the next gen consoles on this.

[Cassius_Smoke]

The fact that the PSVR is compatible is great. And the dedicated 3D sound makes me think that VR might play a bigger part.

[JU!]

PS5 coming seems in 2020 nice summation and article. Guy on Twitter called Ryan Brown did nice summary.

New details on the next-gen PlayStation:

“- In dev for past 4 years
- Will not release in 2019
- Dev kits being deployed
- More powerful CPU/GPU
- Ray tracing support & '3D audio'
- PS VR and 8K support
- SSD support
- Will have discs
- PS4 back-pat“

[JU!]

Very, very shocked ray tracing is in, as most graphics cards and games cannot support it. 8K prob end of life stuff. Surprised no Dolby Atmos or Dolby Vision/HDR10+ mentioned. 3D Audio is amazing hear PSVR stuff and RE2 Remake. Glad about PSVR support Move wants need replacing ASAP though!

[CMcK]

*skip this post if you aren’t into tech geek stuff*

From a leak earlier today -

PS5 memory and storage systems

• 24 GB RAM in total (20 GB usable by games)
• 8 GB in form of 2 * 4-Hi stacks HBM2
• Sony got "amazing" deal for HBM
• in part due to them buying up bad chips from other customers which can't run higher then 1.6 Gbps while keeping 1.2v.
• HBM is expected to scale down in price a lot more than GDDR6 over the console lifetime
• Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix already shifting part of their capacity towards HBM due to falling NAND prices
• Sony will be one of the first high volume customers of TSMCs InFO_MS when mass production starts later this year (normal InFo already used by Apple in their iPhone)
• InFO_MS brings down the cost compared to traditional silicon interposers - has thermal and performance advantage as well
• InFO_MS allows them to drive their 1.6 Gbps chips @ 1.7 Gbps (435 GB/sec.) without having to increase the voltage above 1.2v
• HBM is more power efficient compared to GDDR6 - the savings were invested into more GPU power
• additional 16 GB in form of DDR4 @ 256 bit for 102.4 GB/sec.
• 4 GB reserved for OS, the remaining 12 GB usable by games
• memory automatically managed by HBCC and appears as 20 GB to the developers
• HBCC manages streaming of game data from storage as well
• developers can use the API to take control if they choose and manage the memory and storage streaming themselves
• memory solution alleviates problems found in PS4
• namely that CPU bandwidth reduces GPU bandwidth disproportionately
• 2 stacks of HBM have 512 banks (more banks = fewer conflicts and higher utilization)
• GDDR6 better than GDDR5 and GDDR5x in that regard but still less banks than HBM
• at the same time trying to keep CPU memory access to slower DDR4
• very satisfied with decision to use two kinds of memory for price to performance reasons
• allowed them to go below ~50 GFLOPs per GB/sec. bandwidth but still keep above 40 GFLOPs per GB/sec.

Good setup for avoiding CPU / GPU memory contention but possibly lower than expected VRAM bandwidth. And I certainly would not have expected 24GB RAM in total. Add in the super fast SSD (Optane?) and possibly a mechanical HDD for mass storage this is going to be an expensive system.

[escobarrr]

We do not yet know if the year 2019 will be the year of announcement and / or release of the PS5, but one thing is certain: Sony is activating internally for the launch of its next home console

[CMcK]

Very, very shocked ray tracing is in, as most graphics cards and games cannot support it. 8K prob end of life stuff. Surprised no Dolby Atmos or Dolby Vision/HDR10+ mentioned. 3D Audio is amazing hear PSVR stuff and RE2 Remake. Glad about PSVR support Move wants need replacing ASAP though!

I think AMD will want to leverage their position supplying both console APUs to determine the lowest common denominator for ray tracing and shape how developers use it. How much die space it uses remains to be seen but once you add in denoising support it’s going to be a reasonable amount of the GPU which some games will likely never use.
Roll On E3. I’m now a bit more optimistic about how the next generation of consoles is going to shape up.