Wednesday, March 18th 2020
Sony Reveals PS5 Hardware: RDNA2 Raytracing, 16 GB GDDR6, 6 GB/s SSD, 2304 GPU Cores
Sony in a YouTube stream keynote by PlayStation 5 lead system architect Mark Cerny, detailed the upcoming entertainment system's hardware. There are three key areas where the company has invested heavily in driving forward the platform by "balancing revolutionary and evolutionary" technologies. A key design focus with PlayStation 5 is storage. Cerny elaborated on how past generations of the PlayStation guided game developers' art direction as the low bandwidths and latencies of optical discs and HDDs posed crippling latencies arising out of mechanical seeks, resulting in infinitesimally lower data transfer rates than what the media is capable of in best case scenario (seeking a block of data from its outermost sectors). SSD was the #1 most requested hardware feature by game developers during the development of PS5, and Sony responded with something special.
Each PlayStation 5 ships with a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 SSD with a flash controller that has been designed in-house by Sony. The controller features 12 flash channels, and is capable of at least 5.5 GB/s transfer speeds. When you factor in the exponential gains in access time, Sony expects the SSD to provide a 100x boost in effective storage sub-system performance, resulting in practically no load times.
The secret sauce here is that Sony is using its own protocol instead of NVMe, in supporting 6 data priority tiers versus 2 on NVMe. Each PlayStation 5 ships with an 825 GB SSD, which is expandable using external HDDs over USB, or a selection of third-party M.2 NVMe SSDs certified by Sony. PlayStation 4 games can run directly off your external HDD, but PlayStation 5 games have to be transferred from your HDD to the console's main SSD. Past generations of PlayStation implemented ZLib data compression on Blu-ray and HDD media. PlayStation 5 is implementing Kraken, with hardware-accelerated de-compression via fixed-function hardware built directly into the main SoC.
SoC is where Cerny sounded restrained in what he wanted to disclose. The SoC is a semi-custom chip designed by Sony and AMD, possibly on a 7 nm-class silicon fabrication process. Sony won't specify if it is a monolithic silicon or an MCM, but there are three building-blocks to it: CPU, GPU, and I/O complex. The CPU is based on AMD "Zen 2" x86-64 microarchitecture, and the GPU is based on the company's upcoming RDNA2 graphics architecture.
There are eight "Zen 2" CPU cores, although the company didn't mention if SMT is featured. The maximum CPU clock speed is 3.50 GHz. The GPU is a whole different story from the one on the Xbox Series X Velocity Engine semi-custom chip. Sony decided to go with 36 RDNA2 compute units ticking at up to 2.23 GHz engine clock, compared to 52 compute units running at up to 1.825 GHz on the upcoming Xbox. Sony's GPU ends up with up to 10.3 TFLOPs max compute throughput, compared to Microsoft's 12 TFLOPs.
Sony also shed some "light" on the hardware-accelerated real-time ray-tracing approach AMD is taking with RDNA2. Apparently, each compute unit features a hardware component called "Intersection Engine," with roughly the same function as an RT core on NVIDIA "Turing," which is to calculate the intersection of rays with geometry (such as triangles or polygons) in a scene. This combines with a fairly standardized bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) model to achieve a hybrid of ray-traced elements in an otherwise conventional rasterized 3D scene (pretty much where NVIDIA is right now with RTX). On PlayStation 5, RDNA2's ray-tracing hardware is leveraged for positional audio, global illumination, shadows, reflections, and full ray-tracing.
The third key component of the SoC is the I/O complex. This handles all of the chip's I/O, not just with peripherals and video output, but also storage and memory. There are dedicated I/O co-processors on-silicon designed to reduce the various I/O's processing stack on the CPU cores, and reduce latencies at various stages. There's also a certain amount of SRAM that caches transfers between the various components on the I/O complex. The custom chip leverages AMD SmartShift in power-management.
PlayStation 5 uses 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. Sony did not mention the memory clock, bandwidth, or even the memory bus width. It did drop some hints about memory management. It appears like PlayStation 5 does not partition memory the way Xbox Series X does, and possibly sticks to the hUMA model of the PlayStation 4 (using a common pool of physical memory for system- and video memory).
Lastly, a large chunk of Sony's presentation focused on the next frontier for hardware innovation: positional audio. Sony is investing heavily on positional audio that takes into account the gamer's physical HRTF (head-related transfer function). The company is leveraging the vast amounts of CPU power gained from the upgrade to "Zen 2," to achieve this.
We still don't know what a PlayStation 5 console will look like.
Source:
Sony Computer Entertainment (YouTube)
Each PlayStation 5 ships with a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 SSD with a flash controller that has been designed in-house by Sony. The controller features 12 flash channels, and is capable of at least 5.5 GB/s transfer speeds. When you factor in the exponential gains in access time, Sony expects the SSD to provide a 100x boost in effective storage sub-system performance, resulting in practically no load times.
SoC is where Cerny sounded restrained in what he wanted to disclose. The SoC is a semi-custom chip designed by Sony and AMD, possibly on a 7 nm-class silicon fabrication process. Sony won't specify if it is a monolithic silicon or an MCM, but there are three building-blocks to it: CPU, GPU, and I/O complex. The CPU is based on AMD "Zen 2" x86-64 microarchitecture, and the GPU is based on the company's upcoming RDNA2 graphics architecture.
There are eight "Zen 2" CPU cores, although the company didn't mention if SMT is featured. The maximum CPU clock speed is 3.50 GHz. The GPU is a whole different story from the one on the Xbox Series X Velocity Engine semi-custom chip. Sony decided to go with 36 RDNA2 compute units ticking at up to 2.23 GHz engine clock, compared to 52 compute units running at up to 1.825 GHz on the upcoming Xbox. Sony's GPU ends up with up to 10.3 TFLOPs max compute throughput, compared to Microsoft's 12 TFLOPs.
Sony also shed some "light" on the hardware-accelerated real-time ray-tracing approach AMD is taking with RDNA2. Apparently, each compute unit features a hardware component called "Intersection Engine," with roughly the same function as an RT core on NVIDIA "Turing," which is to calculate the intersection of rays with geometry (such as triangles or polygons) in a scene. This combines with a fairly standardized bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) model to achieve a hybrid of ray-traced elements in an otherwise conventional rasterized 3D scene (pretty much where NVIDIA is right now with RTX). On PlayStation 5, RDNA2's ray-tracing hardware is leveraged for positional audio, global illumination, shadows, reflections, and full ray-tracing.
The third key component of the SoC is the I/O complex. This handles all of the chip's I/O, not just with peripherals and video output, but also storage and memory. There are dedicated I/O co-processors on-silicon designed to reduce the various I/O's processing stack on the CPU cores, and reduce latencies at various stages. There's also a certain amount of SRAM that caches transfers between the various components on the I/O complex. The custom chip leverages AMD SmartShift in power-management.
PlayStation 5 uses 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. Sony did not mention the memory clock, bandwidth, or even the memory bus width. It did drop some hints about memory management. It appears like PlayStation 5 does not partition memory the way Xbox Series X does, and possibly sticks to the hUMA model of the PlayStation 4 (using a common pool of physical memory for system- and video memory).
Lastly, a large chunk of Sony's presentation focused on the next frontier for hardware innovation: positional audio. Sony is investing heavily on positional audio that takes into account the gamer's physical HRTF (head-related transfer function). The company is leveraging the vast amounts of CPU power gained from the upgrade to "Zen 2," to achieve this.
178 Comments on Sony Reveals PS5 Hardware: RDNA2 Raytracing, 16 GB GDDR6, 6 GB/s SSD, 2304 GPU Cores
It, to me, feels a lot like the Japanese efficiency paradigm in full effect here (cars, maximization of limited capability in other sectors, etc.). Whereas, in Microsoft's case, they seem to be using a brute force method (Americana - "there's no replacement for displacement"). Both methods get the job done. However, I think Sony learned more from their one generation of more traditional PC hardware usage. What I mean is that they (Sony) seemed to have maximized their short experience with more traditional PC hardware from the PS4 than Microsoft has in their more than one generation of using traditional PC hardware.
As for the rest, I never said you needed to use a controller at all, I just said that your outright dismissal of controllers at all based on what you yourself call one five-minute experience with one is a poor decision; I wouldn't try to convince you to use a controller in a competitive FPS, but there are plenty of other games where it's a far superior solution to kbm.
So let's discuss your point:Okay, you had a bad experience. Not much time at all to try to get used to something (I bet it took you a lot more than five minutes to figure out mouse aim the first time!), but sure.Again: controllers are not ideal for this type of game. Not by a long shot. But that apparently doesn't get in the way of the rather large group of professional console gamers in games like CoD, so apparently they aren't horrible either - it just depends on what you're used to. I would never accept anything other than kbm being better, but dismissing it outright after five minutes is premature at best. I also entirely agree with having a PC for mouse-dominant games (I could never play most RPGs on a console, ugh), but as I also clarified above: my main response was directed towards the person you said you agreed with, who was saying aiming in Uncharted sucked and therefore controllers sucked, to which I said movement in the game (a third-person action-adventure) would suck far more if you were using a keyboard. I guess it was dumb of me to group the two of you together like that seeing how you were saying different things, but that was also part of the point: that you were "agreeing" with each other while talking about entirely different things.
On consoles it's all about the drives. HDDs in PS4 and Xbox One are pretty slow in general. And it doesn't help that games got twice as big between 2015 and today.
I have the One S. Loading times for most games are atrocious.
Forza Motorsport 6 is the worst. It takes few minutes to launch the game and few more to start a race.
So if I just want to play a single race, I spend 10 minutes playing and 5-6 waiting.
So yeah, for me loading times are the biggest issue with consoles. I'm fine with current quality and 1080p even. RTRT is the only other change I care about.
Does it mean all this "awesome custom SSD" nonsense is needed? No. "Normal SSD" in the Xbox will be perfectly fine. But Sony probably didn't have other advantages to talk so much about...
EDIT; Xbox seems spec'd higher. My bad. Sometimes speed-reading has it's downsides..It's all good.
There's no reason to believe you can't on the new consoles
Overall PS4 sales since launch of both consoles is still higher.
Both Microsoft and Sony usually sell their systems at a loss initially. They make it up with accessories, game licensing, subscriptions to services.Xbox users wont have full access to that 1TB though.LOL do you know how TFLOPS are calculated? Do you also know it only takes into consideration one operation by a compute chip? It doesnt tell the whole story. Its also primarily marketing for consoles since average console player doesnt know what the hell it is. Its rarely used as an actual way of marketting a chip when it comes to PCs, etc.
Overall system performance between the 2 systems, Xbox is really only about 10-15% more powerful. There's no "unlocking" boost on Xbox. They are already pushing thermals at this point.
Also making parts of your posts in bold, doesnt make you sound any smarter.
Time will tell
But Navi is more efficient at calculating game graphics and will be much faster.
I mean it's clear your a Sony fanboy, but the thing isn't even out yet to properly compare to NVMe. I wouldn't bet on it beating a proper MLC drive, personally.
I have got nothing that is Sony, excuse me!
And I am not planning to get anything Sony soon!