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After Xbox revealed brand new details on the Xbox Series X, it's time for Sony to do the same with the PlayStation 5. Mark Cerny will be explaining some new information about the PS5's architecture and technology, giving us an idea of what to expect when the console launches later this year. Get ready to watch the stream with us, when it begins at 9am PT, where we'll be covering all the announcements made during the broadcast.

Live Coverage

In place of their canceled GDC plans, this stream will explain Sony's goals for the PS5's hardware.

They mentioned the difficulty of developing for the PS3, saying that they made sure they listened to the developers for the PS4 and going forward. "Game creators matter".

The most requested feature of a new PlayStation made by developers was to have an SSD. The goal is to create a console that developers can easily get used to, and realize their creations faster.

Here are the specs for the PS5, compared against the PS4 on the right.

The PS5 plans to target 5 GB/s bandwidth, instantaneous seek times, and 0.27 second load times, with no load screens.

PlayStation is explaining how they use strategies to hide load times, or how developers need to compromise their game in order to fit it on a Blu-ray.

The SSD will have a size of 825GB, and those who want more storage can easily add it.

Cerny is now talking about custom decompression methods for game data, and the custom processors in the SSD.

The PS5 will ideally have 100x faster I/O over the PS4.

If you want to use PS4 backwards compatibility, it's recommended to use an external hard drive for your titles as to not encroach on the premium SSD space.

Sony will have an expansion bay for an extra m.2 drive, with supported drives and their physical sizes to be revealed at a later date.

The PS5 will have a custom RDNA GPU. They're working together with AMD.

Not every game will be supported by backwards compatibility, but Cerny says a list of the top 100 PS4 titles will likely be supported by the PS5's launch.

Primitive Shaders allow for on the fly rendering. There's a new feature called the Geometry Engine.

Ray Tracing is supported, though developers don't necessarily need to use it.

Mentioning that previous PlayStation consoles haven't always handled power consumption and overheating issues in the best of ways, the PlayStation 5 will be able to run off a constant amount of power, with the CPU and GPU varying depending on the game, rather than previous generations where systems ran on varying power consumption and a constant CPU/GPU output.

The GPU freq is capped to 2.23Ghz and the CPU is 3.5 GHz. The variable frequencies won't make the system get as hot or loud as the PlayStation 4/Pro did as often.

Audio helps immerse and enhance the gaming experience. That's why the PS5 will have 3D audio that'll assist players in making the best experience possible. In a graph detailing how humans hear sound, Sony explains how they use HRTF to create directional audio.

Tempest 3D AudioTech is what the PS5 will use.

Instead of using Dolby Atmos, Sony wanted to not be held back by licensed use scenarios and limited to the support of specific sound bars.

Audio engineers are implementing digital surround sound, for those that don't have fancier audio setups to make the most of the Tempest Audio Engine.

According to Cerny, PS4 audio sounds "flat" compared to the PS5's audio.

There will be 5 HRTFs to choose from, for players to get their best sound for their personal experience.

 

[64bitmodels]

In the live stream. Not in this thread.

oh. sorry for the vitriol then

 

[sarkwalvein]

Interesting information. Compared to the Xbox Series X we have a CPU slower by a margin of 100MHz, so irrelevant in terms of perceptible performance, 15.4% weaker GPU, *but* all 16GB of memory are high speed GDDR6, the SSD is very interesting, albeit smaller, and we have a normal NVMe slot which means far better upgrade path. It's looking a lot like the Xbox One X vs. PS4 Pro in terms of specs so far, not too shabby. To be fair though, we are comparing the stock PS5 to the "Pro" SKU of the Xbox, we don't really know how the standard Xbox will look like as they curiously haven't showed it yet. Big shame about the BC, I was hoping for a smooth upgrade path, but on the other hand I wasn't planning to trade in my Pro or X anyway, so it doesn't affect me - it will affect sales though.

Perhaps I see wrong... but isn't all the memory at a speed that is slower than the 10GB high speed in the Series X, and faster than the 6GB low speed?
I think when I saw the specs the bandwidth of the PS5's 16GB was in between the high and low speed from Series X.

 

[64bitmodels]

yeah, and it will fucking cost way higher, oh and granted that ps4 hardware can just work as is with the rest of the ps5 hardware, like their custom ssd storage

IDK man, the wii was like 249 at launch price with GCN compatibility, 3ds (after price drop) was 169 with ds compatibility, and this is looking up to be 600-500 without ps4 backwards compatibility
GCN on wii and DS on 3ds worked well even when they had different storage, same for wii u and wii

 

[Engezerstorung]

the wii was basically a pumped up GC, and the wiiU was a pumped up wii
nintendo are really cheapstakes in hardware developpement, if it is usually retro-compatible with previous gen its because its basically the same tweaked architecture and slighty better specs, that's why you end up with some "famillies" of retrocompatibility

 

[depaul]

I hope to see that PS5 'destroys' Street Fighter 5 long boring loading scene in less than one second!

 

[Foxi4]

Perhaps I see wrong... but isn't all the memory at a speed that is slower than the 10GB high speed in the Series X, and faster than the 6GB low speed?
I think when I saw the specs the bandwidth of the PS5's 16GB was in between the high and low speed from Series X.

You're right, it is indeed dead in the middle, on the Series X it's 560GB/s or 336GB/s, I'll add a clarification to my post, well-spotted!

 

[Nobody_Important4u]

The presentation was intresting for me but not for general masses.
I really Hope that they put Backwards compatible with at least everything besides ps3 without bullshit cmon i wanna play my VeggieTales: LarryBoy and the Bad Apple and Nicktoons: Unite!
But really i don't care for 300fps and 10k if there are no good games so i wanna see the age of PS2 return!
Also people that say "hurr durr pc is being very better beacause of gaphics" can fuck off!

 

[RLXD]

Had the stream running in background and maybe misunderstood Cerny, but did he say that the PS5 will always be running at max power consumption with kind of a static fan curve so that there won't be any jet sounds like in GoW or Horizon?

 

[Foxi4]

Had the stream running in background and maybe misunderstood Cerny, but did he say that the PS5 will always be running at max power consumption with kind of a static fan curve so that there won't be any jet sounds like in GoW or Horizon?

The CPU is set to have a variable frequency, much like on PC. As for the "jet syndrome" of the PS4, that's entirely the fault of poor thermal compound and shoddily applied, low quality thermal pads. Most PS4's, even launch models, can be as quiet as a whisper provided they're periodically dusted and have their paste and pads replaced with something that's not trash, like some MX-4 or N1-H1. The fan shape contributes to the noise as well, but to Sony's credit, they did adjust the PS4 Slim/Pro design to feature a removable top cover that enables users to clean the system without having to remove the warranty stickers or use any tools - a feature that I hope will still be present on the PS5.

 

[Silent_Gunner]

Also people that say "hurr durr pc is being very better beacause of gaphics" can fuck off!

 

[RLXD]

The CPU is set to have a variable frequency, much like on PC. As for the "jet syndrome" of the PS4, that's entirely the fault of poor thermal compound and shoddily applied, low quality thermal pads. Most PS4's, even launch models, can be as quiet as a whisper provided they're periodically dusted and have their paste and pads replaced with something that's not trash, like some MX-4 or N1-H1. The fan shape contributes to the noise as well, but to Sony's credit, they did adjust the PS4 Slim/Pro design to feature a removable top cover that enables users to clean the system without having to remove the warranty stickers or use any tools - a feature that I hope will still be present on the PS5.

That did not really answer my question. I know that the CPU will be variable in frequency, but I think I heard him talking about their new approach on cooling with a always max power consumption and a new cooling system to compensate the resulting thermals, without having the jet syndrome. I did replace my PS4 Pro's Delta Fan with a Nidec one, applied some thermal grizzly kryonaut on the APU and some thermal grizzly minus pad 8 on RAM etc. and still have the jet syndrome in several games i.e. GoW, Horizon, DQH2,... It's not really a thing of bad thermal compound and pads. It's a major design flaw within the whole cooling system.

 

[Silent_Gunner]

That did not really answer my question. I know that the CPU will be variable in frequency, but I think I heard him talking about their new approach on cooling with a always max power consumption and a new cooling system to compensate the resulting thermals, without having the jet syndrome. I did replace my PS4 Pro's Delta Fan with a Nidec one, applied some thermal grizzly kryonaut on the APU and some thermal grizzly minus pad 8 on RAM etc. and still have the jet syndrome in several games i.e. GoW, Horizon, DQH2,... It's not really a thing of bad thermal compound and pads. It's a major design flaw within the whole cooling system.

OK, I had a PS4 Slim, but was the PS4 seriously that loud? Like, louder than my Lasko tower space heater loud?

 

[RLXD]

OK, I had a PS4 Slim, but was the PS4 seriously that loud? Like, louder than my Lasko tower space heater loud?

Just listen:

 

[xdarkx]

I'm guessing a lot of the dislike to the livestream are from people who are not game devs. Pretty sure that is Sony's fault for not making it clear in their tweet.

 

[DANTENDO]

Just listen:

Someone in the room with a hairdryer lol

 

[Silent_Gunner]

Just listen:

Still not louder than my space heater! And this is more of a subjective thing, but it certainly isn't as loud as the Dreamcast's disc tray when loading a game, and nowhere nearly as loud as a hacked FAT PS3!

 

[RLXD]

Still not louder than my space heater! And this is more of a subjective thing, but it certainly isn't as loud as the Dreamcast's disc tray when loading a game, and nowhere nearly as loud as a hacked FAT PS3!

Sure, it is subjective, but the pitch of the sound can be really annoying. I even stopped some games because it annoyed me that much.
Can't remember that my Dreamcast achieved a pitch like this but I didn't turn her on for a while.

 

[Silent_Gunner]

Sure, it is subjective, but the pitch of the sound can be really annoying. I even stopped some games because it annoyed me that much.
Can't remember that my Dreamcast achieved a pitch like this but I didn't turn her on for a while.

Top fucking kek, you stopped a game because your machine made noises at a pitch that was "rancid" to your ears? XD

 

[RLXD]

Top fucking kek, you stopped a game because your machine made noises at a pitch that was "rancid" to your ears? XD

Sure. If the noise kinda distracting me from the game it can happen. Had to pump the volume up and my g/f was about to kill me . Wasn't a very good game, tho.

 

[shano]

Still not louder than my space heater! And this is more of a subjective thing, but it certainly isn't as loud as the Dreamcast's disc tray when loading a game, and nowhere nearly as loud as a hacked FAT PS3!

Good thing i replaced my broken GD-ROM with a GD-EMU and the Stock Fan replaced with a Noctua Fan. Can hardly hear that the thing is turned on and running.