The ninth-generation console war is on.
Sony on Wednesday presented a deep dive into the development process and hardware of the PlayStation 5, just a few days after Microsoft did the same with its Xbox Series X. Both consoles are set to debut this holiday season.
The presentation, given by PlayStation 5’s lead designer, Mark Cerny, might actually have been too deep a dive. It had originally been intended for this month’s Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco, which was cancelled due to COVID-19. It was written for an audience of other designers and professional game developers, and focused heavily on the design and technology that powers the new PlayStation.
Cerny began his talk by saying that “there will be lots of chances this year to talk about the PlayStation 5 games,” so he wasn’t planning on doing so. The presentation didn’t involve so much as a screenshot, let alone game footage. If you’re interested in how the sausage is made, so to speak, with a modern video game console, it wasn’t a bad way to spend an hour. As a marketing tool, Cerny’s presentation was a little worse than useless. If you watched the premiere with stream chat enabled, you could watch the hype die by inches in real time.
That isn’t to say that there wasn’t any information to be gained from today’s show, however. Cerny went into detail regarding the specs of the PlayStation 5, with a full list released via Digital Foundry. The PS5 is planned to ship later this year with a custom high-speed solid-state drive, a CPU based off of AMD’s Zen 2 technology, and a custom 3D audio unit called Tempest 3D. Part of the development process involved finding “other areas in which we can innovate” besides simple graphics performance.
The SSD was, Cerny said, one of the most-requested features by PlayStation development teams, but one that was usually brought up in the context of knowing that it was likely impossible. The process of making it a reality was surprisingly involved, and required custom hardware like a flash controller. Otherwise, the SSD in the PS5 would be outputting data too quickly for the rest of the machine to handle it.
The result is that the PS5 has a lot of useful features to both the end user and a developer, such as booting up “ultra-fast,” with no loading screens and no lengthy installation times for game patches. The current PS4 has to keep a lot of data parked in its system memory in case the player does something in the next 30 seconds that will need it, such as quickly running into a new area, but the PS5 only needs to work one second in advance.
Because of that, designers don’t need to make concessions to loading times when they’re creating games. If you’ve ever played a game where you took a seemingly-unnecessary 30-second elevator ride (there’s a good example near the end of last year’s Resident Evil 2 remake) or ran down an empty corridor that led up to a big open area, it was due to the game’s developers pulling a trick to camouflage what would’ve otherwise been a long loading screen. With the PS5’s SSD, you don’t need to do that anymore, and can freely transition directly between complicated locations in-game.
It also frees up a lot of space in a game’s files, as designers can “de-duplicate” data. The example Cerny used was from 2018’s Spider-Man on the PS4, where certain reusable assets like mailboxes had to appear as often as 400 times in the final product’s code, because they were such a consistent part of the game’s environment that they were constantly being loaded into memory. Now they only have to be included once.
The PS5’s SSD will have a capacity of 825 GB at launch, but the console features an internal bay where you can install commercial SSDs to expand the unit’s capacity.
However, Cerny cautioned, any expansion drive you install has to be at least as fast as the PS5’s custom drive in order to run PS5 games off of it. Many currently-available SSDs are significantly slower than the PS5’s 5.5 gigabytes per second, and of those that are as fast or even faster, many of them won’t fit inside the PS5’s bay due to coming with their own heat sinks or fans. Cerny noted that Sony is currently beta-testing various commercial SSDs to figure out what can and cannot work with the PS5, although they aren’t likely to have finished that process by the time of the system’s launch. (In other words, don’t run out now and pre-buy an SSD. It probably won’t work.)
Cerny was also sure to mention that during the process of developing the PS5’s custom CPU with AMD, they’ve treated backwards compatibility as a “key need.” You can run stored PS4 games on the PS5 from an external HDD if you like, saving the system’s SSD space for PS5 games. At launch, Cerny expects that almost all of the top 100 PS4 games, as ranked by time spent on them by players, will be playable on the PS5.
The PlayStation 5 project also involved experiments as to how to expand or deepen the gaming experience, and for Cerny’s team, that meant 3D audio. On PS4 games, barring peripherals like a soundbar, a surprisingly low amount of the system’s power is dedicated to audio. This was partially remedied with the PlayStation’s dedicated VR headset, which has its own audio unit, and which Cerny said “provided a hint as to where we could go.”
The result was a custom 3D audio unit in the PS5 that ended up being named Tempest 3D, because “it suggests a certain intensity of experience.” It features hundreds of advanced sound sources, so developers don’t have to pick and choose which of the sounds in a game’s environment get access to 3D audio and which don’t. The idea is to build a sense of “presence and locality,” in order to provide the impression that you’re actually in a game’s environment.
PS5 vs. Xbox Series X
The ninth generation of consoles is, at time of writing, effectively a fight between the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5. Nintendo will, as ever, remain content to do its own thing with the Switch, leveraging its portability, first-party games library, and indie support to stay in the conversation, but not even trying to go head-to-head with Sony or Microsoft on a technological level.
(Here you may ask, what about Google Stadia? Well, what about it? At this point, nothing short of direct divine intervention will make it an actual contender here.)
If you put the specs of the PS5 and Series X side-by-side, via Digital Foundry’s deep dives or this article from Venturebeat, the differences are relatively subtle. Both companies have talked up the inclusion of an SSD as a quantum leap forward for games, and both companies plan to ship their consoles at launch with a startling amount of horsepower. The differences between the two, in the end, come down to both companies’ design priorities.
Simply put: the Series X is likely to have an edge on visible details like display resolution and consistent framerate, but the PS5 has dedicated a lot of resources to data transfer and audio design. If you were to run a game on both units side by side, you could expect the Series X version to look and move a little better, while the PS5 version will load faster and provide more immersive sound.
The differences between the systems on a pure hardware basis, however, are likely to be largely academic. The Series X might be better for fast-moving online gameplay like a Halo or Call of Duty, and the PS5 looks like it’d have an edge on providing big open worlds like Spider-Man’s New York, but it’s all theory at this point.
The question, as ever, is going to come down to both companies’ dedicated game libraries. Sony has an edge going into this, with a broad assortment of proven first-party developers, but Microsoft has been making a number of big acquisitions in the last year, scooping up cult-favorite studios like inXile, Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and Obsidian Entertainment. Microsoft also appears more interested in focusing on subscription services, such as the Xbox Game Pass, while Sony focuses more on the previous consumer model where you buy your games one by one.
Today, however, Microsoft has come out looking slightly better off. During Cerny’s presentation today, it quietly opened a dedicated website for the Series X, which briefly listed its planned release date as Thanksgiving of this year. (It’s currently listed as “Holiday 2020.”) I’d initially thought that Sony’s lack of announcements about the PS5 so far was part of the same let-them-go-first strategy that arguably made the PS4 the winner of the eighth console generation, but now, that silence is looking much less deliberate than it used to.
