The road to PS5 "deep dive"

The road to PS5 "deep dive"

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.