It’s now been more than a year since the PS5 was (not really) available all over the world. To celebrate this curious anniversary, her architect Mark Cerny allows himself the luxury of boning her and rethinking her design.
The man in the many hats knows a lot about the latest Sony console, as he had the opportunity to explain the peculiarities and other lines of thought in detail during the Game Developers Conference in March 2020 Person on the microphone Wired the advantages of such a position in the design of the PS5:
The end users of the console are the developers; It’s great to have worked with so many teams over time because I understand what could help them and what could get in their way.
The size is important
And because it has obviously changed the lives of gamers who are tired of waiting in front of endless loading screens, Cerny starts by talking about the SSD, which is obviously nothing magical:
Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic, called old hard drives “rusty tips” and accused them of dragging the industry down. The developers wanted to get rid of hard drives because that’s where the data is stored, and so do I; takes time to get there. I’ve worked on games myself that sometimes required creating lanes just to hide loading times. The developers wanted a read speed of at least one gigabyte per second: We wanted to aim for a speed five times higher.
In the same tone, always so incredibly relaxed, the architect recalls the sometimes stormy meetings, considering it necessary to take into account the opinion of the most devious developers in order to try to improve the PS5, leading console architects in particular to improvements and data compression optimize. At first glance, not everyone seems to have received the message …
Heart (s) on you
With a smile on his face, Mark Cerny assures us that he would have loved to equip the PS5 with a single and overpowering CPU, but without such technology, Sony would be targeting an 8-core Zen 2. which not necessarily everyone likes:
When we consulted the developers, there were some who really wanted to use 16 cores, but we told them that this would have required a reduction in the GPU, and everyone immediately gave up on the idea.
Said RDNA 2 GPU actually occupies a strategic place to ensure backward compatibility with the PS4 games library, and we can measure its importance all the more since Sony has only marketed one and only first title so far. Clank Rift apart.
In conclusion, Cerny explains that the developers did not necessarily ask for ray tracing on the console, but does not hesitate to compare this technological voucher with the transition from 2D to 3D due to its very high geometric complexity. We’ll leave you alone to judge this perhaps a little haunted ghost in the comments below …