(Wired) EXCLUSIVE: WHAT TO EXPECT FROM SONY'S NEXT-GEN PLAYSTATION

Snowdog

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Unlike previous rumors of the PS5. This is a visit to Sony and interview with Mark Cerny. But it does confirm much of previous rumors: Zen 2, Navi, Ray Tracing, SSD, 8K support:


https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-sony-next-gen-console/
PlayStation’s next-generation console ticks all those boxes, starting with an AMD chip at the heart of the device. (Warning: some alphabet soup follows.) The CPU is based on the third generation of AMD’s Ryzen line and contains eight cores of the company’s new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. The GPU, a custom variant of Radeon’s Navi family, will support ray tracing, a technique that models the travel of light to simulate complex interactions in 3D environments. While ray tracing is a staple of Hollywood visual effects and is beginning to worm its way into $10,000 high-end processors, no game console has been able to manage it. Yet
 
That SSD bit is exciting stuff, slow rpm hdds was my biggest issue with the previous hardware (well, besides 60 fps still being a rarity).

I just know I'm going to get hyped for this next gen PlayStation, pick one up on launch day then not play the thing for several months. :-/
 
Wired's Peter Rubin has interviewed Sony's Mark Cerny at the Sony headquarters in California. During the interview, he learned that the PlayStation 5 will be a revolutionary upgrade over the PlayStation 4. The console will not see the light of day in 2019 and Sony has hastened the distribution of development kits. It will feature an AMD chip at its heart with 8 cores based on AMD's new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. The Navi based GPU will fully support ray tracing and it will be used for audio in addition to graphics. The feature will not require external hardware for gamers to hear the effects and Cerny emphasized the presence that the new audio system has.

“As a gamer,” Cerny says, “it's been a little bit of a frustration that audio did not change too much between PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. With the next console the dream is to show how dramatically different the audio experience can be when we apply significant amounts of hardware horsepower to it.”

Mark Cerny didn't reveal PSVR plans during the interview other than to say, "'I won't go into the details of our VR strategy today,” he says, “beyond saying that VR is very important to us and that the current PSVR headset is compatible with the new console.'" The console will feature a SSD that is faster than any device currently available for PCs. Cerny said a PS4 with a SSD has 1/3 faster loading times. The new console loads 19 times faster and this allows for new game experiences! The upcoming console supports 8K resolutions and will still accept physical media. It is backwards compatible with the PS4. Lastly Cerny was quoted saying, "'we are cloud-gaming pioneers, and our vision should become clear as we head toward launch.'”

To demonstrate, Cerny fires up a PS4 Pro playing Spider-Man, a 2018 PS4 exclusive that he worked on alongside Insomniac Games. On the TV, Spidey stands in a small plaza. Cerny presses a button on the controller, initiating a fast-travel interstitial screen. When Spidey reappears in a totally different spot in Manhattan, 15 seconds have elapsed. Then Cerny does the same thing on a next-gen devkit connected to a different TV. (The devkit, an early “low-speed” version, is concealed in a big silver tower, with no visible componentry.) What took 15 seconds now takes less than one: 0.8 seconds, to be exact.


PS5Lisa_Su.jpg
 
8K, Ray Tracing, SSDs oh my!

Way to reveal before Microsoft yet again though 0_o
 
So does that mean amd is adding ray tracing cores to their upcoming GPUs or is it just marketing bs?
 
Obligatory archive since it's Wired:
https://archive.fo/mdsco

Backward compatibility with PS4 sounds like it's confirmed. I would love to see Spider-Man running on that dev kit. I just hope we get close to a full desktop CPU this time around instead of a neutered mobile chip again. The weak Jaguar cores really held back this generation of games.
 
So does that mean amd is adding ray tracing cores to their upcoming GPUs or is it just marketing bs?
Dr. Lisa Su's statement on ray tracing was "I’m not going to get into a tit for tat, that’s just not my style. So I’ll tell you that. What I will say is ray tracing is an important technology. It’s one of the important technologies; there are lots of other important technologies and you will hear more about what we’re doing with ray tracing. You know, we certainly have a lot going on, both hardware and software, as we bring up that entire ecosystem.

I would say that we are deep into development and that development is concurrent between hardware and software. And so for us, it’s, you know, what is the consumer going to see? The consumer doesn’t see a lot of benefit today because the other parts of the ecosystem are not ready. I think by the time we talk more about ray tracing, the consumers will see that."



With the new consoles supporting ray tracing and the bulk of those games eventually coming to the PC, I would expect AMD to roll out their new ray tracing tech in Navi.
 
So does that mean amd is adding ray tracing cores to their upcoming GPUs or is it just marketing bs?
I don't believe AMD is going to be adding dedicated hardware just for ray tracing at this point. Their strategy will probably be to partition and repurpose compute cores for ray tracing based on the application. This is based on Lisa Su's prior statements, as pointed out by cageymaru above.
 
That SSD bit is exciting stuff, slow rpm hdds was my biggest issue with the previous hardware (well, besides 60 fps still being a rarity).

I just know I'm going to get hyped for this next gen PlayStation, pick one up on launch day then not play the thing for several months. :-/

Depends how much space they offer. Some of these next gen games will be massive. 4tb ssd could cost more than i'm prepared to pay for the whole console.
 
Depends how much space they offer. Some of these next gen games will be massive. 4tb ssd could cost more than i'm prepared to pay for the whole console.
I think 1TB will be the standard moving forward, as prices on those are getting very reasonable these days. Since it sounds like this console may be a return to pushing the limits again like Gen 7 the "PS5" may very well be pushing $600 like the PS3 or even more, making me believe there will be several SKUs offered at different price points. So long as they continue to offer an easy way to upgrade the internal storage I'm okay with that.
 
wouldn't be surprised if it was using some form of storeMI/octane type caching system.. i'd suspect it'll also include a 2 or 4TB mechanical drive as well.
 
Interesting this is. Pretty much what I expected, but glad to have confirmation of it.

So their custom chip is going to be an APU. Given what we have seen so far with Zen 2, I would honestly be very surprised if this was a monolithic die. I am speculating that they probably are just going to wholesale reuse the existing zen2 chiplets that are coming out for the next Playstation.

So their APU die would be something like a 8c Zen 2 chiplet, a semi-custom IO die for whatever type of memory subsystem they are connecting to, and then some sort of navi-chiplet connected to the IO die?

The real question in my mind is the memory subsystem. Are they going to go with what they did on the PS4 again and wire in GDDR6 as shared memory for the CPU and GPU? Are we going to see something like the Intel-AMD hybrid CPU where there is a HBM2 cache on die and separate system ram? Or maybe a combination of both?

This is quite interesting to me. Regardless, I think this design could also signal what Zen 2 AM4 APU's might look like for PC's. (Though I'm not sure there is enough room on the package for a HBM chip without shrinking the IO die to 7nm as well.)

The last bit about Solid State storage rather than a spinning disk. I have no idea how they would make that economical... but if true, this will be a blood game changer. It would be an astronomical improvement that would lead us to the future where a fast SSD would be able to actually improve the gameplay itself rather than just improve loading speed while still being limited to designs based on traditional mechanical hard drive speed.
 
It's good to see AMD still getting the contracts here. Having a large customer for some of the low binned mass volume CPU and GPU parts is huge and plays into their chiplet strategy very well.

Other than that, consoles are a huge "meh" to me. Haven't owned one since the 80's when I first discovered PC's.
 
I'm curious about this SSD that is faster than anything available in a PC.
I think he exaggerated a bit, sounds more like they changed the data bus to better take advantage of fast storage and replaced the HDD with a ssd, which would easily be 19x faster than a PS4 with a hdd at loading games.
 
A big see i told you so here. In the last 2-3 years i've been trying to tell internet trolls that ps5 or whatever they call it would not launch until 2020. and boom heres that confirmation. don't doubt me.
 
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A big see i told you so here. In the last 2-3 years i've been trying to tell internet trolls that ps5 or whatever they call it would not launch until 2020. and boom heres that confirmation. don't doubt me.
What do you mean...? Almost everyone was anticipating a 2020 or 2021 launch since that follows the regular release and life-cycle of consoles.
 
A SSD is a must. The loading times on consoles are torture. Focusing on 60fps would be nice for once. With additional horsepower it should be feasible for far more games if they acknowledge that FPS are an actual thing.
The PSVR is pretty cool, but clunky and underpowered. A new version might finally be what it takes to bring VR to the mainstream. Right now most people only know the current PSVR and phones, which both have major issues.
 
I'm excited for BC with the PS4.
I see no reason why it can't emulate PS1 & PS2 though.
 
I would imagine it's just a 1TB drive if it's a pure SSD, I doubt it will be bigger unless it's a hybrid of some-sort. The costs wouldn't play well to include a 2 TB or larger SSD into every system, along with the rest of the next gen stuff
 
I'm excited for BC with the PS4.
I see no reason why it can't emulate PS1 & PS2 though.

depending on how they do it it may even be able to emulate PS3. I mean they have the code for whatever they are using to emulate PS3 for the streaming service, I would imagine at this point we aren't far off from emulating that based on these specs

Now will they is another issue. I really wish they would do a Sony master system kind of thing. Play anything Sony ever, all on one system. Imagine a store front where you get all your previously digital purchased titles back, as well as where you could buy anything Sony ever made. And if they redid their PS1 and PS2 and PSP emulators you could have better looking games like you do on the PC. O to dream...
 
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So does that mean amd is adding ray tracing cores to their upcoming GPUs or is it just marketing bs?

Its "ray tracing cores" that was always the marketing BS.

NV realised they where going to take a marketing bath in 2019 as developers, Sony, MS, and AMD all started hyping their next gen consoles for either late 2019 or early 2020. NV was NOT Developing Ray tracing in a real way on the hardware side. They have bolted Tensor hardware on for their non gamer customers. So they got their engineers to figure out how to get that calculating rays. Truth is its a very stupid way to go, as you are now employing multiple disparate systems on the chip to chunk the same math... latency ensues... and sure your doing a ton of raw calculations but guess what it still means frame rates being halved.

The real way to do things is to use the same shaders to calculate math so everything is using the same internal buffer space. Shaders ARE the best way to do ray tracing... we simply need more powerful and plentiful shaders to dedicate to the job. (and software that properly does that) Which is why Lisa rightly talks about Hardware AND software solutions to the ray tracing stuffs.
 
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What do you mean...? Almost everyone was anticipating a 2020 or 2021 launch since that follows the regular release and life-cycle of consoles.
i don't know where you've been the last 8-12 months. but just late last year i was arguing with people on this forum about this.

lolol, Let them have their moment XD
Um yeah i'm gonna take one of my many monents here. lol you people i tell ya.
 
QLC, or even higher bit densities, which are perfect for read-heavy applications like games.

Exactly from what they are saying I would expect SSD storage no PC user would want to touch... with sluggish write, but very fast read speeds. If all your games are downloaded write speed is hardly important anyway.

I would not be shocked to see something semi new with high density and 20-40% higher read speeds then we see in decent SSDs... but with half or more less write speeds due to the density.
 
Nice to hear about the SSD, but I wonder what that'll do to the cost and/or storage capacity. I wonder if they will somehow try to do SSD+HDD.

Also interesting to hear them demoing Spiderman. I wonder if that is an inclination that they are trying to make backwards compatibility happen, or if they've just repurposed that game for testing purposes.
 
I am actually looking forward to this next console generation. Hopefully they target at least 60FPS and have robust VRR support on compatible televisions!
 
They could use an Intel CPU and NVidia GPU. It doesn't have to be an APU.

Way too much heat for a console form factor. You need low power solutions and Intel's low power chips suck. Nvidia has burned bridges with both Sony and MS in the past, they're not going near Nvidia any time soon. Besides, two separate chips mean two separate, large, sources of heat to deal with and two major points of failure. An APU is really the only option for modern consoles.
 
Nice to hear about the SSD, but I wonder what that'll do to the cost and/or storage capacity. I wonder if they will somehow try to do SSD+HDD.

Also interesting to hear them demoing Spiderman. I wonder if that is an inclination that they are trying to make backwards compatibility happen, or if they've just repurposed that game for testing purposes.
From the article:

Because it’s based in part on the PS4’s architecture, it will also be backward-compatible with games for that console.
 
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