Mark Sulfur (Mark Cerny) – leading system architect PlayStation 5. In the material for Wired, he talked about how the console was created and how it differs from the previous generations PlayStation, in the design of which Sulfur I also took a direct part.
The most interesting moments from his story:
Sulfur He began his career in the early 1980s as a game developer for arcade machines. He never stopped engaged in video games and, for example, helped with production Death Stranding And Marvel’s Spider-Man. Thanks to this, he very well understands the needs of developers and knows that in the architecture of iron helps them and what interferes with.
Creation of PS5 (like any console) began with a brainstorming. The hardware team has a list of ideas: some new ones, and some wanted to introduce in the last generation, but it did not work out. There is one more list – what the game developers want to see in the next console.
The developers asked for SSD on PlayStation 4. The chapter spoke especially for this Epic Games Tim Suini (TIM SweENEY): He believed that hard drives restrained the entire industry and called them "rusty rotating media".
Sulfur And he himself went https://stakezone-top.co.uk/login/ through this: he had to make games with a bunch of narrow corridors, which are needed only so that the engine managed to consider all the necessary data from a slow drive.
One of the locations of Jak II, where the Sweres was a programmer and designer. Pay attention to the lot of narrow corridors.
The developers asked NVMe SSD at a read speed of at least 1 GB/s. Sony took into account this request, but raised her bar to 5-10 GB/s. "In such things, it is always good to aim higher", – Comments Sulfur.
Only relatively recently, console manufacturers began to communicate tightly with developers when designing the next generation.
For many years, as a developer, I really wanted such a dialogue. I am looking for developers who set against me the most difficult tasks who have very hard opinions about what they need to play their dreams. Such meetings are simply dental, but this is good, since in the end the console becomes better.
One of the functions that appeared as a result of conversations with the developers is the so-called “invisible compression”, part of the integrated-input strategy. Developers direct the data of their games to the tools Sony, and he himself is engaged in decompression using a special PS5 chip.
Compression results vary from the game to the game, however Sulfur calls several particularly vivid examples: Subnautica PS4 takes 14 gigabytes, and on PS5 – only 4 gigabytes; Control Ultimate Edition – about 50 gigabytes on PS4 and about two times less on PS5. Despite the fact that in Miles Morales For PS5, they added better models and textures, the size still turned out to be a little smaller than on PS4.
When designing a custom computing chip, you have to choose how much to select on the central processor, and how much – for graphic. Some developers asked to make a central processor for 16 nuclei, but immediately abandoned this idea when Sony explained that in this case it would be necessary to make a graphic processor less productive. This is due to the fact that graphics in modern games are considered the most important component.
The PlayStation 5 graphics processor is based on RDNA 2, but many changes were made to it. Some small ones: for example, when PS5 "paints", the reason is much easier to find than on PS4. Some, as it put it Sulfur, giant: for example, reverse compatibility with PS4.
For the sake of reverse compatibility, hundreds of thin graphic “features” PS4 had to be taken into account, each of which should perfectly play on PS5. A certain game whose circulation on the PS4 was several million (name Sulfur does not reveal), broke on PS5: the character ran too quickly because of an increased framew. To fix this specific bug, the engineers had to introduce performance limiters.
50-year history of video games Sulfur divides into two large technological eras: two -dimensional and three -dimensional. Ray tracing is such a revolutionary thing that it begins the third era, I’m sure Sulfur.
After conversations with developers, rays trace did not fall into the list of basic wishes. As he believes Sulfur, Developers simply did not believe that the PS5 would work well with raiding. However, in the end, during the very first show with projects for PS5, six games were already used tracing.