Exclusive: A Deeper Look at the PlayStation 5 (archive)
Sony skipped games show E3 this year, a void during which Microsoft unveiled details about its own next-gen console, a successor to the Xbox One referred to only as Project Scarlett. Like the PS5, Scarlett will boast a CPU based on AMD's Ryzen line and a GPU based on its Navi family; like the PS5, it will ditch the spinning hard drive for a solid-state drive. Now, though, in a conference room at Sony's US headquarters, [Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan] and system architect Mark Cerny are eager to share specifics.
Before they do, Cerny wants to clarify something. When we last discussed the forthcoming console, he spoke about its ability to support ray-tracing, a technique that can enable complex lighting and sound effects in 3D environments. Given the many questions he's received since, he fears he may have been ambiguous about how the PS5 would accomplish this—and confirms that it's not a software-level fix, which some had feared. "There is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware," he says, "which I believe is the statement that people were looking for." (A belief born out by my own Twitter mentions, which for a couple of weeks in April made a graphics-rendering technique seem like the only thing the internet had ever cared about.)
Sony confirms the PlayStation 5 is coming in 2020, reveals new hardware details
[Since] games are getting quite large (Red Dead Redemption 2 took up nearly 100GB; The Elder Scrolls Online is even larger), the PlayStation 5 will use 100GB optical discs. It will support the 4K Blu-ray disc format.
Previously: Sony's Next PlayStation Will Include an AMD Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU
Microsoft, Sony Partner on Streaming Games, Chips and AI
Microsoft Announces New Xbox Console and xCloud Streaming Game Service
Related Stories
Sony's PlayStation system architect Mark Cerny has confirmed hardware details about Sony's upcoming PlayStation console, including the use of an 8-core "7nm" Zen 2 CPU from AMD, and an AMD "7nm" Navi GPU of unspecified size/performance. The version of Navi in the console will also support real-time ray tracing:
The big news here of course is that Cerny is confirming that Sony is tapping AMD's latest CPU and GPU architectures for the next-generation PlayStation's chip. On the CPU side we're looking at 8 CPU cores based on AMD's Zen 2 microarchitecture. This is the same CPU microarchitecture that AMD is expecting to launch in PCs mid-year, with products such as their Ryzen "Matisse" CPU and second-generation EPYC "Rome" processors. While we're still waiting to see just how well the Zen 2 architecture performs in the real world, it's succeeding the already very powerful Zen (1) architecture, so everyone has high expectations here and AMD seems eager to deliver on them.
Meanwhile on the GPU side, AMD will be tapping their forthcoming Navi GPU architecture for the chip. Unlike the CPU side, Son[sic] and Cerny aren't saying anything here about the GPU configuration, so there's little to be said about performance; all of that will come down to how big of a Navi GPU block Sony has asked for. Navi itself is a codename we've seen on AMD's GPU roadmaps since 2016, however we still know relatively little about the architecture beyond the fact that in 2016 at least, AMD was intending to focus on scalability and support for next-generation memory (which at this point we'd take to mean GDDR6). Like the Zen 2 CPU architecture, we're expecting Navi-powered GPUs to start shipping this year for PCs, so we should have a better idea soon of all of what Navi will entail.
However in the meantime, Cerny himself did open up a bit about Navi – or at least the version that will be going into Sony's chip. The next-generation PlayStation will support ray tracing, mirroring developments we've seen in the PC world in the last year with the introduction of DirectX Raytracing and hardware support in rival NVIDIA's GPUs. Over the last couple of years, ray tracing has increasingly been heralded as the next evolution in GPU rendering technologies, as it allows for more realistic rendering methods to be used, especially with regards to light. Ray tracing is expensive, but done right it can add to a game in ways that can't be done cheaply (if at all) with pure compute-shader based approaches.
A "custom unit for 3D audio" is also mentioned, and the console will use an SSD instead of an HDD. 8K resolution support will be included (at least for video output, if games don't run at that resolution).
The next-generation Xbox console is rumored to feature similar hardware (8-core Zen 2, 12 teraflops Navi, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD). There is also talk of a streaming-focused Xbox with cheaper hardware (8-core Zen 2, 4 teraflops Navi, 12 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD).
Also at Wccftech.
Microsoft Corp and Sony Corp on Thursday said they struck a strategic partnership in which Sony would use Microsoft's cloud for streaming games and media and the two would work together to develop image sensors.
The deal is in its early stages, with many specifics yet to be determined. But the owners of two major consumer interactive entertainment franchises – Microsoft's Xbox platform and Sony's PlayStation – would collaborate to stream games and content to consumers and offer game makers new development tools.
[...] Sony shares jumped nearly 11 percent as Asian markets opened. Microsoft's stock closed up 2 percent on Thursday.
Sony's deal with Microsoft comes at a time when the Japanese firm's gaming business is losing some steam as its PlayStation 4 (PS4) console nears the end of its life.
Analysts widely expect Sony to launch a next-generation console in 2020 to replace the five-year old PS4, but for this year at least Sony has flagged a drop in profit.
The next-generation Xbox console referred to as "Project Scarlett", scheduled for release in late 2020, will feature a custom AMD "7nm" Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU. The console will include hardware support for real-time raytracing, and include an SSD for significantly faster loading times. The console will also be able to use the SSD as virtual memory. The console will support up to 8K (7680×4320) resolution and 120 frames per second (presumably not at the same time for most - if any - games, but the console should at least support 8K video streaming). These details are extremely similar to those that were revealed about Sony's next PlayStation console.
Microsoft's xCloud streaming game service will launch in October 2019. It will allow gamers to stream games from Microsoft or those stored locally on their Xbox One consoles.
Also at The Verge.
See also: PlayStation 5's Beefier Hardware Could Help Mitigate Indies' Optimization Troubles, Says Ubisoft Dev
Related: Microsoft, Sony Partner on Streaming Games, Chips and AI
Microsoft Announces Xbox Series X: Available Holiday 2020
Microsoft this evening has finally given their long-awaited next generation gaming console a name, announcing the Xbox Series X. The device, formerly known as Project Scarlett, is said to be four times more powerful than the current Xbox One X, and along with its new Xbox Wireless Controller will be available in the Holiday 2020 timeframe.
[...] While Microsoft is still not offering a detailed breakdown of hardware specifications at this time, the company has reiterated their E3 announcement – that the box is powered by an AMD APU combining their Zen 2 processor cores and next generation RDNA architecture – while revealing the first performance estimate for the console: four times the processing power of the Xbox One X. It's not clear here whether Microsoft is talking about CPU performance, GPU performance, or both – but given that even AMD's fastest discrete GPUs today don't exceed 10 TFLOPS, it is likely a reference to the CPU side of matters and AMD's much faster Zen 2 CPU cores (and going by comments made to GameSpot, this seems to be exactly the case).
As well, the company is reiterating the technical features for the console: hardware raytracing, variable rate shading, Xbox One backwards compatibility, and a "next-generation" SSD. All of which will be used to offer games at 4K@60fps or better, with Microsoft indicating that 120fps will also be an option for developers (no doubt driven by the high refresh rates allowed by HDMI 2.1).
Related: Sony's Next PlayStation Will Include an AMD Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU
Microsoft, Sony Partner on Streaming Games, Chips and AI
Microsoft Announces New Xbox Console and xCloud Streaming Game Service
PlayStation 5 Includes AMD Hardware-Based Ray Tracing, Supports 100 GB Blu-ray Discs
Microsoft has confirmed that it will launch a lower-priced version of its next-generation Xbox console following several leaks.
It was confirmed that the Xbox Series S would be launched in November for $299 (£249.99 in the UK). The leaks are pinning the release date for both of the new Xbox consoles as November 10th, and the price of the larger Xbox Series X console at $499.
The Xbox Series S will have a smaller SSD (512 GB vs. 1 TB), and will not include a disc drive, like Sony's PlayStation 5 Digital Edition. The console will target a 1440p resolution at up to 120 FPS (likely less in practice), but can use "4K upscaling for games". It includes hardware-accelerated DirectX raytracing, variable rate shading, and variable refresh rates.
Previously: Sony's Next PlayStation Will Include an AMD Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU
Microsoft Announces New Xbox Console and xCloud Streaming Game Service
PlayStation 5 Includes AMD Hardware-Based Ray Tracing, Supports 100 GB Blu-ray Discs
Microsoft Announces Xbox Series X for Late 2020 Release
Microsoft's Next-Gen Xbox Will Use AMD's RDNA 2 GPU Architecture, 12 TeraFLOPS
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday October 09 2019, @02:35AM (3 children)
Ray Tracing Galore: Intel's Xe Graphics Reported to Join the Bandwagon [tomshardware.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 09 2019, @05:40AM (2 children)
> Intel
> Xe
Seems par for the course.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 09 2019, @12:10PM (1 child)
I'm confused, what gender is Xe supposed to mean?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 09 2019, @12:57PM
Xenomorph
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 09 2019, @04:39AM (2 children)
But muh Cloud(tm) Gaming(tm).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday October 09 2019, @04:49AM
PlayStation 5 Venezuela Edition.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday October 09 2019, @03:31PM
Cloud Gaming is a convenient evil. GOG is the way to do cloud gaming correctly and not be evil. Until then, optical discs are the way to keep consoles from being just another online store. Sure, you may lose out quite a bit on the resale of Disc Games, but at least you can get something back out of it. Going 100% cloud for something like Playstation/Xbox, would remove a selling point in my opinion.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday October 09 2019, @08:24AM (6 children)
Wow, I didn't realise optical media was still a thing. I thought it was long consigned to second-hand shops & Ebay.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday October 09 2019, @12:00PM (4 children)
Ultra HD Blu-Ray Specification Completed [soylentnews.org]
4K gave the optical disc possibly its last breath of life, with mainstream 66 GB and 100 GB discs, from 25-50 GB (up to 128 GB BDXL discs had been available for years prior).
There have long been promises of 1 TB or larger discs. Archival Disc [wikipedia.org] was finally announced a few years ago, but if it even exists, you won't find it at the Walmart.
There's a possibility that a mainstreaming of 8K would lead to another consumer Blu-ray disc format at a larger size, perhaps matching the smallest Archival Disc at 300 GB. But in a world of streaming, 1 terabyte microSD cards and such, it's hard to see it happening.
What optical really needs to shine again are Superman 5D holographic crystal discs [soylentnews.org]. 1-6 terabytes per disc is not sufficient. It should be at least hundreds or thousands of terabytes per disc. Make it relatively cheap and resilient, and you have something that companies and individuals will love, even if it can be difficult to fill (assuming it is not rewriteable).
As for the PlayStation 5, you can pretty much count on a future Slim/Pro variant removing the optical drive, again, in about 3 years.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 09 2019, @12:19PM (3 children)
1-6 TB per disc seems pretty much the perfect size. It's just about exactly right to make a complete backup of a hard drive, and as long as the discs cost less than the hard drives do, it could be a reasonable archival format.
The real problem with these discs is that consumers will just store stuff on SD cards (until they bit rot and lose all their data), then external mechanical drives after they learn their lesson about the reliability of flash. Enterprises that need really large amounts of cold storage will be using tape. Everyone in the middle will use the cloud (which mostly still means mechanical hard drives or tape, but almost certainly not optical discs). There's not going to be that much demand for them, especially given that consumer-writable optical discs also tend to have lifetimes of only perhaps ten years.
But for the Playstation, having an optical drive will make lots of people happy. Gamestop gets to stay in business for at least a little while, customers that want to resell their games will be happy, and it's an advantage over Microsoft, who probably won't put any drive at all in the next XBox. That sort of perceived advantage can sell a lot of game consoles even if most people don't end up actually using the drive all that often.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday October 09 2019, @12:41PM (2 children)
A decisive increase in capacity would set a new optical/holographic format apart from the crowd.
1-6 TB per disc doesn't approach single tapes, as LTO [wikipedia.org] has a clear roadmap for reaching over 100 TB per tape, and those capacities have been demoed [soylentnews.org].
The biggest hard drives are now 16-20 TB, with 24 TB and larger coming real soon now. 8-10 TB HDDs for consumers are easy to find at reasonable prices. $160 for 10 TB. A rewriteable HDD would arguably be more useful to consumers, and might last 10 years.
Typical blank 25-50 GB Blu-ray disc prices are far from great on $/GB. If there was a new 1 TB disc sold in 5-packs, would it beat external HDDs on $/TB? 100-1000 TB discs might be better positioned to do so.
On the NAND front, a non-volatile post-NAND technology with better endurance could really shake things up. But stuff like Crossbar RRAM have been vaporware and 3D XPoint is just a tier stuck in between DRAM and NAND, not a replacement.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 09 2019, @05:10PM (1 child)
But with LTO tape drive you have a steep initial price. Second hand can be a good alternative if the drive is in good condition. New can be from 1800 - 2000 dollars, and add the SAS controller and cables.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday October 09 2019, @05:58PM
I don't disagree, although you could also see high initial prices for a new format optical drive.
My point is that getting past 100 TB opens up opportunities. HDDs could eventually hit 100 TB but it could take up to 10-15 years, although Seagate claims 2025 [tomshardware.com] using bit-patterned media with HAMR. Tape is hitting 100 TB but a new 100+ TB 120mm wide optical disc format could potentially be much denser. It is easy to make a 100 TB SSD, but it's going to cost at least $5,000-10,000, for now.
Instead of making a 120mm wide disc for compatibility with CD/DVD/Blu-ray, maybe it could be stacked like hard drive platters and put into an external enclosure.
By the way, I mentioned 6 TB because that was a supposed capacity target of the vaporware Holographic Versatile Disc [wikipedia.org]. Also close to this thing [wikipedia.org] (never heard of it until now).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday October 09 2019, @03:40PM
Thankfully, not consigned to history, yet. While something like Netflix is a nice convenience. It by no means replaces a personal DVD/Blu-Ray collection.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Wednesday October 09 2019, @02:27PM (5 children)
I enjoy playing the latest games (a select subset of them), but I'm not irrational about graphics quality. My current PC can handle everything at 1080, so I'm not aggressively shopping for a graphics card, but that does not stop me from keeping an eye on new releases.
With AMD also supporting ray tracing in the near future, I wonder if AAA titles will start requiring that hardware. I doubt it, but since my hardware purchases are every couple years now I think I will wait for a ray tracing capable GPU between 2-300USD. I already convinced myself to wait to see what comes out of Intel before making any new hardware decisions; I may not choose Intel but more competition in the market would help that purchase.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 09 2019, @02:38PM (2 children)
If you're only running 60Hz on 1080 you are missing out on stunning graphics. I finally sprung for a GTX760ti card and a 120Hz monitor and gaming is a whole new world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 10 2019, @12:53AM (1 child)
Past 60FPS it's not really about graphics quality, but about making the game more responsive. Going from 60Hz to 120Hz can improve the responsiveness of the game by 33msec on average, and substantially more in worst case situations. That's huge... In the right sort of game. For other games, it doesn't matter at all.
I honestly don't see much need for higher resolution, either. Kind of like how 4K on TVs doesn't really buy much except for finally putting a stake in interlaced video and reducing the visibility of encoding artifacts. In other words, stuff that doesn't actually have much to do with the resolution.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday October 10 2019, @02:27AM
4K is a nice place to stop. The displays and TVs are somewhat cheap now. Beyond 4K is relevant to VR. VR could use up to 16K according to my rough calculations [soylentnews.org], or 32K for 360-degree video capture. Foveated rendering would reduce the GPU requirements. It might be neat to see a monitor with a front-facing camera and depth sensor for foveated rendering, but I haven't heard anything about that except speculation [archive.is].
1366x768 is still dominant on cheaper laptops (sub-$300). That will eventually be replaced by 1080p and even 4K.
Past 120 Hz is relevant to VR. 240 Hz is probably the target. A case has been made for 960-1000 Hz [blurbusters.com]. I would at least check out an in-person demo if that ever gets manufactured as a consumer product.
High Dynamic Range and 10/12-bit color look like objectively good things to have, although with HDR you run into a problem of artistic control. Game developers have used HDR in different ways [resetera.com], some ineffectively. You also have varying levels of brightness, e.g. 400, 600, 1000, or 10,000 nits, with HDR400 considered crap. Probably the best case scenario for HDR would be a stealth game with lots of shadows, or maybe a film noir style movie. Ray tracing with HDR could deliver very realistic lighting effects for games.
If some spec looks absurd to you, don't sweat it and don't pay a premium for it. Eventually we will see 4K TVs as the minimum option on the market, so there will be no point to buying 1080p unless you are getting a clearance or freecycled one.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 09 2019, @02:43PM
Ray-tracing is not primarily for games. It's for deep-fake celeb/revenge porn
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday October 09 2019, @03:30PM
The AMD ray tracing on console hardware will likely be used for limited touch-up stuff that can be turned off or adjusted with sliders. Like puddles, shadows, fog, smoke, etc.
I think it will be quite a while before PC games start rejecting players with 2019 or older GPUs (including RTX 2000 GPUs where ray tracing capability is a hyped tech demo). PC games need to reach a wide audience, many of whom [steampowered.com] are still using dual/quad cores (next-gen consoles will have 8 strong AMD Zen 2 cores, 16 threads, aka not Jaguar) or integrated graphics.
A good PC game can scale well to both high-end and low-end hardware, with wide variance in resolution, graphics detail, and FPS. Skyrim is a pretty good example. It runs well on my trash and was ported to Nintendo Switch.
Are you going to play Cyberpunk 2077?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 09 2019, @09:43PM (1 child)
* walks away angrily*
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday October 10 2019, @02:28AM
Don't worry, Sony and Microsoft are basically making identical consoles at this point. There's even collusion [soylentnews.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]