that Wired recently spoke with PlayStation 4 lead architect Mark Cerny, who is leading the development of Sony's next game console, due out in 2020. The official name of the system has not yet been announced, but we will call it out of habit PlayStation 5. Already, a number of studios and game developers have developer tool kits in their hands and the ability to optimize their creations for the upcoming console.
Mr. Czerny, in accordance with his own ideas and requests from game developers, seeks to make the new system more revolutionary than evolutionary. For nearly a hundred million PS4 owners, this is really good news: Sony is preparing something completely new. We are talking about fundamental improvements in terms of CPU, GPU, speed and memory.
The basis will still be an AMD chip, this time produced in compliance with 7nm standards. The processor will get 8 powerful (probably dual-threaded) cores with the Zen 2 architecture - a very significant improvement, considering that even the PS4 Pro relies on weak cores with the outdated Jaguar architecture. The graphics accelerator, in turn, will represent a special version of the Navi architecture that supports output at resolutions up to 8K and the notorious ray tracing. The latter (obviously, we are talking about hybrid rendering in the spirit of NVIDIA RTX) primarily allows you to make much more physically accurate calculations of lighting and reflections.
However, according to Mr. Czerny, ray tracing can also be used for non-graphical tasks. For example, the technology allows you to better calculate the sound image of the scene, giving the engine a more accurate understanding of whether enemies can hear the player's steps or, on the contrary, whether the user can hear certain sounds from another room.
At the same time, the AMD chip will also have an improved separate spatial sound unit, which will allow you to take sound realism to a qualitatively new level. You can achieve perfect immersion with headphones, but even on TV acoustics, the difference with PS4 will be clearly audible. Of course, this will also make virtual reality better: the modern PlayStation VR helmet will be compatible with the future console. Sony says that VR is an important area for it, but has not yet confirmed the logical plans for the release of the successor to the PS VR headset.
Even more changes will affect the drive. The new system will use a dedicated SSD. This will lead to fundamental improvements. To demonstrate the changes, Mr. Czerny showed that where on PS4 Pro it takes 15 seconds to load different locations, on PS5 it takes only 0,8 seconds. This change makes it possible to make the loading of game world data an order of magnitude faster, removing a number of technical restrictions for game developers. In fact, it is the transition to high-speed SSD drives instead of conventional HDDs that will allow projects to be taken to a whole new level. Sony promises that the bandwidth will be higher than on modern PCs (possibly using the PCI Express 4.0 standard). All this is complemented by a completely new I / O mechanism and software architecture that will allow you to use the capabilities of SSD to the maximum. According to Mark Cerny, even if you install an expensive SSD in the PS4 Pro, the system will only work a third faster (in the PS5, as indicated above, the real speed increase turns out to be dozens of times).
Sony has yet to say anything about services, software features, games, or pricing. We will not hear any details at E3 2019 in June - for the first time the company own presentation at the annual game show. It is important to note that the future console is still being created with an eye on the possibility of using physical media. The PS5 will also be backwards compatible with the PS4, so the entire collection of games will remain fully accessible and the transition will be smoother than it was with the PS4.
Incidentally, , the future console will cost about $ 500, will receive GDDR6 or even HBM2 memory (probably, as in the case of PS4, it will be common to the CPU and GPU). Sony's hardware kits for select developers arrived earlier this year, and have now been officially confirmed by the company.
Last year, the Forbes resource, citing industry anonymous sources, something about the development of the AMD Navi graphics architecture. It was claimed that it is the fruit of a close collaboration between AMD and Sony. Most of the work on the new architecture was allegedly led by Raja Koduri, who led the Radeon Technologies Group and to work at Intel. Sources said that cooperation with Sony was carried out even to the detriment of work on the Radeon RX Vega and other current AMD projects: Mr. Koduri was forced against his will to transfer up to 2/3 of the engineering team exclusively to Navi. Because of this, desktop graphics cards were worse than expected. However, this also means that some of the technologies of the next generation of consoles will be available on PC this year: it is expected that 7nm Navi-based graphics cards (though without a number of exclusive improvements from Sony) will be released this summer.
How the gaming industry will change in 10 years is not clear. Streaming games may become the norm, but traditional consoles will remain on the market for at least another generation.
Source: 3dnews.ru