The Road to PS5
The Road to PS5 on HackerTube: recommended by 6 Hacker News commenters across 4 separate months, 2020–2023.
PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny gives a deep dive into the PS5's architecture, covering its SSD, I/O, audio and design goals. He explains how removing bottlenecks shapes future games.
What HN commenters said
10 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
xela79Jul 2023Strongly recommends
I can really recommend this tech talk regarding PS4 and PS5 hardware by their lead hardware architect ▶ this video some really interesting topics related to what kind of performance they wanted as a baseline and how to optimize to make the PS5 do what it currently does... like no other platform. a $700 console that: - outputs 4k / HDR (upscaled from lower native res. ofc) - renders games steadily at 30 / 60fps - no hitches, framedrops - always records your gameplay - live video sharing of stream with PS friends - live streaming to youtube - updates of games being installed - downloads of games/data all simultaneous, instant game switches, quick loading times. the experience cannot be replicated with a 1k gaming PC, not even a $2000 machine. They really delivered a device which is imho, more than just "an AMD gaming PC with a custom GUI and some DRM" would have loved to have widescale keyboard/mouse support, as playing Far Cry with a controller is frustrating at best. And keyboard/mouse support is in hands of the game dev if they want to support it or not.
in “RPCS3 – The Open Source Playstation 3 Emulator” · View on HN
greyskullJun 2020Strongly recommends
IMO required viewing for any dev to form a more informed opinion on the SSD tech. Cerny talks about it fairly practically. Starting point on SSD: ▶ this video for about 20 minutes
in “Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming” · View on HN
slx26Jun 2020Strongly recommends
Yes, a lot of people commenting here should really go watch the talk Mark Cerny gave [0]. It's clear there's no "big technological breakthrough". SSDs are great but have been around for a while already, we simply had to wait for the technology to mature enough. What we are seeing is that we can't just keep slapping better CPUs and GPUs to the machines, because the improvements nowaday are not that impressive anymore, so at least for the PS5 they have switched and started focusing on the architecture , removing bottlenecks, removing major pain points, and using additional hardware to handle tasks like compression and freeing resources for other purposes. Some people might say these improvements happen because they were lazy before and never focused properly on dev needs and bottlenecks and the specific needs of game development. I partially agree, but the SSDs really don't just improve disk speed, they allow a completely different set of architectural optimizations. [0] ▶ this video
in “Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming” · View on HN
jonas21May 2021Recommends
I believe "time to 200" is a reference to "time to triangle," which Playstation architect Mark Cerny and others have used to describe the amount of time it takes to get a game engine up and running on a new console to the point where it can render its first triangle [1]. You can see him talking about time to triangle on various Playstation consoles here [2] (and if you have the time, it's definitely worth watching the entire talk). [1] [link] [2] ▶ this video
in “What’s your API’s “Time To 200”?” · View on HN
wincyMay 2021Recommends
The PS5s operating system and even how they package game files had to be developed from the ground up to realize these gains. There’s a good technical talk about it from one of Sony’s engineers. ▶ this video
in “Marvell Announces First PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD Controllers: Up to 14 GB/S” · View on HN
AvamanderMar 2020Recommends
The talk for those interested: ▶ this video I found it really quite interesting, even if I don't game on consoles primarily.
in “PlayStation 5: the specs and the tech” · View on HN
Show 4 more comments
WithinReasonApr 2022Cites it
Well, I tried with some one else who also didn't feel any spatial effect. I think it depends on whether the binaural recording was done with a head/ear shape similar to yours. So you'll just have to take my word for it that the audio positioning is very accurate. A good HRTF implementation should be calibrated to your head, Sony was talking about that when discussing the PS5's spatial audio: ▶ this video
in “MIT researchers develop a paper thin loudspeaker” · View on HN
KiptersNov 2020Cites it
No, they'll have a set of pre-made HRTFs and then use a listening test to pick the most appropriate one for the user ▶ this video
in “Playstation 5 review: Not just a more-powerful PS4” · View on HN
colesantiagoJun 2020Cites it
Yes, gamers don't give a toss about the tech details [0], and they shouldn't, Sony gave a presentation about all of the internals of the PS5 and all they got in response was "ZZzzZZZZZZ". They only want the console for the games, man, nothing else. [0] ▶ this video
in “Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming” · View on HN
ddoolinApr 2020Cites it
It's crazy to see just how far they've come from the first console to the latest and all the lessons they've learned along the way. ▶ this video (Some Playstation 5 architecture highlights).
in “Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis” · View on HN