PlayStation 5 - Overview, Info, Design, Specs, more

Maddox · Apr 5, 2020

Known Devkit One	Low-speed - big silver tower [No Image Available]

Known Devkit Two

Final Design	[To Be Revealed]

Features:

Adaptive Triggers - for offering varied levels of resistance
Haptic Feedback - next-gen rumble
Improved Controller Speaker
Heavier Controller
Larger Capacity Battery

Image is from a Devkit and may not be final

Ability to boot directly into the Single Player Multi-player components from the UI
Single Player to provide information such as mission and rewards in the UI
Multiplayer to provide game servers to jump right in

PS5 is currently scheduled to launch "in time for holiday 2020"

PS5 will be backwards compatible with the overwhelming majority of the 4,000+ PS4 titles

Boosted frequency allowing:

higher or more stable frame rates
potentially higher resolutions

Sony is investing heavily in 3D audio via a dedicated Tempest Engine with custom designs to make sound appear more realistic and situational.

The Tempest Engine has enough processing ability (with a kind of processing called single instruction, multiple data, or SIMD) as all of the PS4’s eight-core processing capability combined — just for 3D audio.

The PS5’s new Tempest Engine will support hundreds of sound sources, meaning it will appear that sound could be coming from hundreds of different directions as you hear it in a game. When you have something like raindrops, you’ll hear them coming from many different directions.

You can also more precisely track locality, or where objects are located. If an enemy is sneaking up on you, you’ll be better able to tell that.

PS5 features hardware based Ray Tracing.

Ray tracing simulates the way light moves in real life, and how it bounces off various surfaces. Games that take advantage of this feature will render objects much more accurately, and with heightened realism. Water, glass, light refraction, a character’s hair and so on, will look even more realistic.

PS5's Ray tracing uses the same strategy as AMD's upcoming PC GPUs.
The CU's contain a new specialized unit called the intersection engine which can calculate the intersection of rays with
boxes and triangles.

I've (Mark Cerny has) already seen a PlayStation 5 title that's successfully using ray tracing based reflections in complex animated scenes with only modest costs.

CPU overhead from data decompression and management is pretty high. The more data that's moved, the more the CPU is taxed, and if it's pushed too far, frame rates drop astronomically.

To solve these issues, a custom decompressor was built directly into the I/O (Input/Output) unit.

PS5's GPU is equipped with what is known as a Cache Scrubber.
This function is used to improve efficiency and ensure the cache isn't filled with redundant data.

The whole process of loading it happens invisibly to you (the developer) and at very high speed.
Allowing the dream of no load screens and super-fast streaming to become a reality.

This memory is synergized with the SSD on an architectural level and drastically boosts RAM efficiency. The memory is no longer "parking" data from an HDD; the SSD can deliver data right to the RAM almost instananeously.

The result sees RAM only holding assets and data for the next 1 second of gameplay. The PS4's 8GB of GDDR5 memory held assets for the next 30 seconds of gameplay.

The I/O unit is capable of handling over 5 gigabytes of kraken format input data a second. After decompression that typically becomes eight or nine gigabytes but the unit itself is capable of outputting as much as 22 gigabytes a second if the data
is compressed particularly well.

The I/O unit also contains a large pool of SRAM which is used principally to direct the variety of custom hardware around it.