Epic reiterates that the PlayStation 5 is a masterpiece of system design

This Epic / PS5 lovefest is weird, especially with the way they keep blurring comparisons between the hardware and the PlayStation OS that runs the system. The PS5 is essentially a 3700x with a 5700 GPU (non-xt) and a bleeding edge PCIe 4.0 SSD that is specc'd to 825gb for over-provisioning. It is also as close to the Xbox hardware as any two competing console have been at launch. There is no "special sauce". The PS5 is just a solid gaming computer with the typical console optimizations and no overhead from Windows. The (proprietary?) PCIe 4.0 SSD won't even be the fastest available by the PS5 launch date - the Samsung 980 series is rumored to be over 6GB/sec read and that should launch by Fall. Other than vague mentions of superior compression (this is in the software/OS) or what might be proprietary SSD controller, there is nothing notable here that can't be argued for any console like being optimized for games or not dealing with the full overhead of a desktop OS.

The PS5 looks cool and it to appears to be a good value for the money, but all this praise should be taken with a grain of salt.

 

The problem is that everything Epic says about the PS5 sounds like something a marketing department would put out.

Until we have some UE5 PC Xbox comparisons people will continue to cynical.

 

OK, but let's talk about the bloatware code of the UE: when will you Epic fix it?

 

Reading this was like playing telephone where the "Road to PS5" video went in one end and this came out the other.

 

I mostly agree with your statements except the ssd part , the speed of the ssd is not the breakthrough really but the custom arm cpu dedicated to do the decompression on the fly skipping the whole process of dedicating 1 cpu just for that and the need to load asset /assets to ram ....allowing games to straight up pull assets straight from the ssd , the way the io works now you main cpu needs to do the decompression then store it to the ram then pull the asset to the game, so in a sense is somewhat like you have your game installed in ddr2 memory , this is the main praise for the ssd i have a feeling if the ssd was doing just 4gb /sec the praise would have been the same . Also this can change and actually shrink game installations atm everything needs to be loaded in ram so even on an open end game you have the town split in chunks where a building asset is saved in 50 different chunks and it is the same copy pasted asset , now in theory the ssd on the ps5 since in theory eliminate the need to split the city in chunks you would only need to have it once and the game will pull the asset every time it needs too, pcs can not do that because the io things have to go threw will cause freezing or at the very least stutter , anyway all those things sound awesome in theory but it remains to be seen how well they work if at all when the ps5 and ps5 exclusives come out.

 

Could it be that EPIC really likes the hardware? Devs seem to be much higher on both the new consoles than any PCMR elitist out there. I think there are a few that are puffing their chests out bawking at these new consoles are seriously afraid that they may push the gaming landscape further forward than their overpriced PC hardware ever did.

 

PC will be fine as always. It's only gotten better over the years, we're getting almost all the console games now days.

 

I mean, maybe? Always seems when a console comes out it's stronger than PC and then PC ends up back on top mid-cycle. I don't personally care. I play games on everything. I'm as close to dropping pc gaming as ever right now. It's just unprecedented to see Epic so infatuated with a new system to me.

 

Master piece - bla,bla.. they did just one good thing that is better storage handling.. and it have some negative effect because storage is very small (for point of view todays 100-150 games) and additional storage would be expensive.
Otherwise they did just obvious upgrade of AMD silicon.
There is also some 3D audio promise, but i heard lots of this sort of promises before lots of times and very, very rarely they actually work.. I remember big promises from the past on MS and Sony part - like photorealistic graphics, cloud, Vita as controller for every game, not blurry VR, backward compatibility through streaming etc? Just big worlds.

 

I agree with this. Epic seems to be a little too excited about PS5 hardware. Sure, if done right, the storage system is a significant improvement. But like I said before, if a game is going to be ported to another system, it has to be developed to compensate for traditional/slower storage, at which point PS5's superior position doesn't really reap any benefits.

 

Epic fail speaks again. Is anyone listening ?

 

Comments like masterpiece tend to make people roll their eyes as it's over the top, so it's normal that people might not trust Epic.

I'm sure the hardware is great, but not yet convinced it's not yet another Emotion/Cell experiment.

 

Epic says a lot when the days are long. And even if it's true - GREAT GAMES sell new consoles, not the other way around.

 

Problem is that people really do not think about how it works. And how it compares to PC.
PCs have system SSD and separate SSD/NVMe for Games. (Not talking about potatoes pretending to be modern PCs.)
Moment one has this separated, all priority around OS loses any meaning.

Then comes actual implementation. On PS5, game engine has ability to ask for certain data with priority. On PC, while we are gaming, we are not reading/writing gigabytes of data per second from/to given storage by other applications, therefore only real read work comes from running game.
And if someone comes and tells me that he made game which is able to ask some library in PS5 to deliver something sooner than something else, but is not actually able to pause or slow down game threads loading same data on PC, I'll call him incompetent.

So, why does PS5 even need those priority levels when actual game that is sole requestor of all accesses to storage?
I think they are glorifying that they moved control of what&when from game engine into asic and this is only kind of control they have.

But game still has to run its own analysis and decide when to change priority. Only difference to current techniques it that priority is not handed to game's subprocess handling actual loading, but to ASIC loading those data. (So it is kind of like giving control to Black Box and hoping that it will behave as expected.)

 

Yea, this talk is very strange specially because they risk angering MS in the process... Maybe Sony is paying them for exclusives or some sort of specific optimizations for the PS5 hardware on their future games.

If Epic really loved hardware then they wouldn´t waste time with consoles because PC hardware is always better. What they really like is money, like all companies.

 

He does have a point - lets take older games that are streamed from optical disc as an example (anyone into emulation and backing up say PS2 games for example will understand)

So many will know, in ye olden times, games would run from optical media which had the benefit of having immense storage but at the cost of very slow access and read speeds, furthermore, optical drives used in these consoles would use CAV - Constant Angular Velocity This meant that that data read from the inside of the disc would be much slower than the outer edges. Now, while this is mostly a limitation of the filesystem used on the optical media, in order for game developers to ensure maximum performance, they would use tricks to ensure the data they needed would read from the disc at its fastest rate, to do this, they filled the disc with useless data "dummy-data" - sometimes it's either just nonsense data that looks corrupted, other times it can be easter eggs such as a famous episode of south park or maya3d models in the beginning of the disc, the point is, the data is arranged in such a way that the game assets are loaded in as fast as possible, keeping us, the consumer waiting for as little time as possible whilst also improving performance.

Why is this still relevant today? While of course Hard Disk Drives are immensely faster than Optical Disc Drives, they still present their own problems, you still have access times, you still have read rates (which are also affected in much the same way as optical media, data at the centre of a platter being much slower to read than at the outer edge) so data stored on the HDDs would be arranged in a way to offer best performance, often with a lot of redundancy to ensure consistent speeds (repeated assets amongst several sectors and we also have to remember, the HDDs used in the consoles are very slow 2.5" disks - these are already much slower than desktop 3.5" disks).

What people are failing to realise is how this will change games - games will likely only have one loading screen now, if at all one, hidden behind a main menu. "Levels" will be seamless - lets take Doom Eternal as an example - you have a hub, the "ship" from where you enter a level/arena, you're presented a loadscreen when you jump into that level because the game has to accommodate the slow loading media, with actually developing for faster media in mind, those load screens will be eliminated.

Now while it's entirely possible to have clean loading and transition zones - it would still be better to eliminate those entirely by having the game load the levels in a much more immersive and graphically pleasing manner rather than passing through a small corridor or warp tunnel etc you could instead see all the levels actively running in game - paired with mesh shaders, become graphically more detailed as you approach them.

There is of course the counter argument that, being on PC, this can all be done in RAM/VRAM and that PCs have had SSDs for a long time. Well the sad thing is, developers simply haven't made games that make use of these benefits as it's either to allow games to run on the lowest common denominator (minimum spec) which often means low vram/ram/HDD or games that are designed to run on consoles (which, in the current generation XBone/PS4 are essentially low spec budget computers).

The one thing we can take from this is, we'll finally get to see amazing games that our PCs have been capable of doing for a long time (that aren't PC exclusive). Exciting times are ahead of us!

Edit: I do agree with the sentiments though about Epic spooning up to Sony though - it's just plain weird.

 

This. As a pc gamer I've learned time and time again no matter the power we have in our systems, no matter what PS5 can do, there's one dirty word that makes everything a level playing field. Parity. The only benefits that will truly be seen will be with Sony exclusives. Where the devs don't have to consider other systems.

 

Sony must have given them one hell of a deal on PS5 dev kits.

 

I was about to post this. I'd like to see the real world performance of the drive. I'll presume Sony is blowing steam like they usually do until there are benchmarks of how the drive performs in reality.

 

Yeah Yeah Yeah we get it Epic you think that the PS5 is an amazing piece of tech. Only time will tell to see if you are indeed correct.