The Road to PS5
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN treats it as required viewing for understanding the PS5's SSD and architecture beyond raw specs.
What it is
PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny gives a deep dive into the PS5's architecture, covering its SSD, I/O, audio and design goals. He explains how removing bottlenecks shapes future games.
Recommended by 6 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2020 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec greyskull · 2020-06 · on “Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming”
IMO required viewing for any dev to form a more informed opinion on the SSD tech. Cerny talks about it fairly practically. Starting point on SSD: [this video] for about 20 minutes
Strong rec slx26 · 2020-06 · on “Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming”
Yes, a lot of people commenting here should really go watch the talk Mark Cerny gave [0]. It's clear there's no "big technological breakthrough". SSDs are great but have been around for a while already, we simply had to wait for the technology to mature enough. What we are seeing is that we can't just keep slapping better CPUs and GPUs to the machines, because the improvements nowaday are not that impressive anymore, so at least for the PS5 they have switched and started focusing on the architecture , removing bottlenecks, removing major pain points, and using additional hardware to handle tasks like compression and freeing resources for other purposes. Some people might say these improvemen
Strong rec xela79 · 2023-07 · on “RPCS3 – The Open Source Playstation 3 Emulator”
I can really recommend this tech talk regarding PS4 and PS5 hardware by their lead hardware architect [this video] some really interesting topics related to what kind of performance they wanted as a baseline and how to optimize to make the PS5 do what it currently does... like no other platform. a $700 console that: - outputs 4k / HDR (upscaled from lower native res. ofc) - renders games steadily at 30 / 60fps - no hitches, framedrops - always records your gameplay - live video sharing of stream with PS friends - live streaming to youtube - updates of games being installed - downloads of games/data all simultaneous, instant game switches, quick loading times. the experience cannot be replicated w
Recommends Avamander · 2020-03 · on “PlayStation 5: the specs and the tech”
The talk for those interested: [this video] I found it really quite interesting, even if I don't game on consoles primarily.
Recommends jonas21 · 2021-05 · on “What’s your API’s “Time To 200”?”
I believe "time to 200" is a reference to "time to triangle," which Playstation architect Mark Cerny and others have used to describe the amount of time it takes to get a game engine up and running on a new console to the point where it can render its first triangle [1]. You can see him talking about time to triangle on various Playstation consoles here [2] (and if you have the time, it's definitely worth watching the entire talk). [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]
Recommends wincy · 2021-05 · on “Marvell Announces First PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD Controllers: Up to 14 GB/S”
The PS5s operating system and even how they package game files had to be developed from the ground up to realize these gains. There’s a good technical talk about it from one of Sony’s engineers. [this video]
Cites ddoolin · 2020-04 · on “Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis”
It's crazy to see just how far they've come from the first console to the latest and all the lessons they've learned along the way. [this video] (Some Playstation 5 architecture highlights).
Cites colesantiago · 2020-06 · on “Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming”
Yes, gamers don't give a toss about the tech details [0], and they shouldn't, Sony gave a presentation about all of the internals of the PS5 and all they got in response was "ZZzzZZZZZZ". They only want the console for the games, man, nothing else. [0] [this video]