Playstation 5 Console Discussion

[Hero-of-Time]

1 minute ago, Happenstance said:

I don’t think that’s fair, I just don’t think any of us understand the complexities of this as much as we might like to think. When Cerney was talking about backwards compatibility he wasn’t talking about hardware but logic etc so it’s obviously more than just the parts they use.

How dare you bring your reasonable expections in here!  

[nekunando]

We'd all love to see the hardware and some games but that was an interesting talk all the same!

I felt he spoke very well and sort of helped to put things into perspective for those of us who perhaps don't really understand all of the technical limitations associated with each console.

I'm not sure what I could have expected but I was secretly hoping there'd be some way of having every generation of PlayStation compatible with PS5, for convenience and ease of access as much as anything.

I'm definitely in the mood to see more, though!

[drahkon]

People already angry because they didn't show the PS5 and the SSD is not 1TB.

[killthenet]

I found it really interesting, Cerny is very good at explaining complex ideas. Will be interesting to see how developers use the new hardware, audio in particular is pretty exciting. 

In terms of the raw numbers there is a bigger discrepancy than I thought there would be between PS5 and Series X but from the way Cerny described the hardware it seems as if it has plenty of unique ways of processing data but we won't know what the difference is until DF do some proper analysis on multi platform games. 

Still hold out hope that the backwards compatibility is more fully featured than he made out, seems very strange that he would mention how much emphasis AMD made on backwards compatibility from the start of development and then backtrack a bit and say only the most played titles would be ready at launch.

[Cookyman]

Cerny just makes presentations so relaxing- he's so chilled.  As for the PS5 itself it may be slightly less powerful than the XBOX but rather than cramming the system with high end parts Sony is being clever in how it precessess and distributes power - very clever stuff.  

A cheeky wee glimpse of the PS5 would have been nice but it wasn't that type of presentation.  Will be interesting to see the prices of both consoles.  

[Choze]

Looks excellent. Similar range as the other console. 

Biggest difference is the PCIE4.0 inclusion aka more than double SSD speeds and virtual RAM handling. Given that both companies made a huge deal about virtual RAM here its interesting that this is the biggest difference.

PCIE4 is not cheap though. 

One pool of fast RAM is also very welcome.

Edited March 18, 2020 by Choze

[Will]

Enjoyed the talk, as expected Sony are going for system throughput efficiency in something that doesn't cause the crazy fan action of the PS4 lineup. You can tell it was a GDC talk and I'm surprised they didn't add any more 'public-friendly' information like some images of the machine or something. I'm sure a lot of people will feel a bit disappointed by not seeing more than this.

The main thing for me was that he mentioned it was due this year, no sign of any delay. 

[Ronnie]

I struggled through the first fifteen minutes, then gave up. People are hungry for PS5 info and that's what they put out? Tone deaf. 

I've no idea why that needed to be a 50 minute presentation to a room with 4 people in it, Xbox's various blog posts and shorter YouTube videos got the job done much better. By all means have a dev-focused video presentation... AFTER a consumer-centric one! And it's not natively backwards compatible? Seriously? I just sold my PS4 on the assumption that Playstation would have finally figured out backwards compatibility. Stupid me for assuming that. 

 

Edited March 19, 2020 by Ronnie

[killthenet]

The messaging from their social media post (and the title of the talk) was a bit off really. They got everyone anticipating it more than a day in advance, people who would never have watched the GDC talk getting excited for it and tuning in live. Microsoft haven't really had any fanfare for their deep dives, not as far as I know anyway (seems like they just dropped the blog post outlining the specs and gave DF a hands on with the hardware).

On paper there isn't really anything different between the type of info that both manufacturers have released, they've both laid out technical specifications and what's new about the architecture but Microsoft's messaging has been a bit more on point. They showed off what the Series X actually looks like and teased the new Hellblade at The Game Awards before doing a less flashy technical deep dive a couple of months later. They know who to target with each presentation whereas Sony have been a bit all over the place, trying to treat it as low key by doing the Wired articles and this GDC talk on one hand while going overboard for the reveal of the logo on stage at CES. 

[Ronnie]

30 minutes ago, killthenet said:

The messaging from their social media post (and the title of the talk) was a bit off really.

Tone deaf messaging. 

Edited March 19, 2020 by Ronnie

[Choze]

Nonsense. The people dissapointed are the same ones championing the xbox.

Sony can reveal at their own pace. There isnt much left to show on the xbox side. No doubt covid 19 has changed plans on both sides.

 

I do think MS's specs have a more 'PR played a big part in the design' aspect. The CPU GPU just are not that different. The difference would have probably been smaller with a single pool of ram or if MS went with the faster SSD(or maybe weaker). For developers these are two nice wins for the PS5.

The SSD will make a big difference with usability, quality of life and time. By that I mean consumers especially.

[Ashley]

1 hour ago, Ronnie said:

And it's not natively backwards compatible? Seriously? I just sold my PS4 on the assumption that Playstation would have finally figured out backwards compatibility. Stupid me for assuming that. 

I didn't watch but what do you mean by not "natively" backwards compatible? Does it need something else to make it so? Trying to read some roundups and they mention it is backwards compatible, but guessing there's more nuance here?

[killthenet]

32 minutes ago, Ashley said:

I didn't watch but what do you mean by not "natively" backwards compatible? Does it need something else to make it so? Trying to read some roundups and they mention it is backwards compatible, but guessing there's more nuance here?

It's weird, Cerny stressed that backwards compatibility was considered from the get go so the architecture is just an evolution of the PS4 but because of the difference in power PS5 won't be able to natively run all PS4 software out of the box, each game will need to be calibrated individually to run correctly on the new hardware. I assume games like The Last of Us Part II and Ghost of Tsushima will be PS5 enhanced out of the gate so will be able to utilise the higher clock speed of the new CPU/GPU.  

What is baffling to me is that the PS4 Pro could change the frequency of the CPU & GPU depending on if the game had a PS4 Pro patch or not, allowing games that hadn't been patched to run at a lower clock speed that matched the specs of the base PS4. Given that the PS5 features a variable clock GPU to begin with it seems odd that the OS can't reconfigure the processors to run in PS4 Mode across the board. Theoretically it should be possible, with extra power reserved for the PS5 operating system that would still need to run in the background, but they said that they're working to have the 100 most played PS4 titles available to work on PS5 at launch which intimates that there is more to it than we'd been lead to believe from previous reports. 

 

[Dcubed]

Sony have really fucked it with the lack of full BC; there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to make it work other than a simple lack of focus and care on BC.  And that is, unfortunately, simply down to Sony's company culture ever since they booted Krazy Ken.  The company just doesn't care about its legacy and it really really shows in the lack of BC here.

 

They could've made it work reletively easily if they gave a shit, but they don't.  Microsoft pulled off 100% Xbone BC because they gave a shit, there's no reason why Sony couldn't have done the same. This is gonna be costly for Sony; especially when their audience suddenly realise that their digital purchases have been disavowed by Sony (again!!) and its easily the biggest disadvantage they have going into next gen now.

 

As far as specs go? Honestly? I don't blame Sony for being behind here.  They were designing a console, while Microsoft were designing an ITX PC and Sony simply weren't expecting Microsoft to zig while Sony zagged.  This whole thing with variable frequency is clearly a panic move, once they realised that there was simply no way that they could hope to match the Series X's specs; this thing was obviously designed to have a 9TF GPU that they are now trying to squeeze every last drop out of now (as per all of the previous hardware spec rumours which all turned out to be true).  There's no way that Sony seriously intended to originally design a console that throttles itself dynamically like a smartphone; developers are going to absolutely hate this.  Consoles are supposed to have fixed, defined specs that developers know that they are guaranteed to be able to work with; that's the whole point of a console! (And indeed, Microsoft made a point to go out of their way to state that their clock speeds were fixed; something that is a given for a console and something that they would only have bothered to do if they already knew that Sony were planning on allowing their system to throttle itself...).

 

Sony are now clearly trying to push the limits of thermals within the chasis that they've now anchored themselves to; the fact that they're touting higher clock speeds than the Series X (and significantly so) is a clear indicator that this is a last minute move to bump up their TF number to make themselves look better on paper and less inferior to the Series X than they otherwise would've.  But this is basically just a PR move, the system won't be able to maintain those clock speeds (it would explode and catch fire if it tried to) and this is going to really frustrate developers because they can't guarantee performance like they can in basically every single other console ever made (and now they need to test for thermal performance during QA too, to make sure that they're not setting PS5s on fire! Imagine how developers like Bethesda are gonna cope with that!).  It also basically guarantees that the PS5 will sound like an exploding jet engine as well...

 

The SSD solution does seem pretty remarkable, but also very expensive...  The real world application is that loading times will be almost 2x faster than Series X, which is nice, but unlikely to be the tremendous advantage that Sony are touting it to be (especially for multiplatform games that will be designed for PC and Series X too).  It also limits their options for external drives (which will be a big problem, considering the PS5's very limited storage).

 

Microsoft have disrupted the console hardware game and Sony are clearly on the backfoot here.  No wonder Sony have been so quiet, while Microsoft have been all guns blazing.  Microsoft knew that they had the winning poker hand this time and weren't afraid to put all of their cards right on the table for all to see.  This is a really bad showing for Sony, especially with this being their first real public showcase of the system (intentional or not, this is their first real public impression; like it or lump it, Sony really needed to come out swinging and they kinda swung and missed here).

 

Sony might not even have as big of a price advantage as we were all expecting either if their custom SSD tech ends up jacking the price up even more...

11 hours ago, Hero-of-Time said:

I'm interested in your thoughts about the sound tech in this, @Dcubed. I know you do love some good audio features.

This is certainly a very interesting part of the system, with some nice potential.  However, from my personal experience with Sony's headphone ear measurement tech (I have a set of Sony headphones that uses this same tech), I haven't really been impressed with it really.  And the fact that it's only going to work with headphones (presumably Sony ones) at launch? With crappy TV speakers next and then proper surround systems godknowswhen in the future? I'm not convinced that this HRT tech gonna really live up to their hype, their current solution just isn't very good (and Sony's virtual surround tech with their soundbars and speakers generally isn't all that great).

 

What does make me happy though is that they have a dedicated DSP chip again for audio.  Throughout all of gaming history, time and time again, the decision to have a seperate DSP chip for audio has always paid dividends, so I'm expecting good things from Sony's first party developers in that regard.  Sound mixing in PS4 and Xbone games has generally been fairly disappointing really; especially coming off of PS3, which had some real standout experiences like MGS4 and God of War 3.  However, I get the feeling that we'll only really see first party exclusives and Capcom games end up taking advantage of the tech; going by what we're seeing with games on Switch, where most developers and publishers are cutting corners with sound whenever they get the chance (despite the fact that Switch has a dedicated DSP sound chip that is capable of some amazing surround sound mixing, like what we see in Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate and Luigi's Mansion 3 - if a game isn't made by Nintendo EPD, Next Level Games or Capcom? You'll be lucky if it has surround sound at all, let alone a good surround sound mix).  Unfortunately, the truth is that only a tiny fraction of a console's audience actually has a dedicated surround sound setup, with the majority of people playing games on their crappy TV speakers; as such, sound mixing is often just not given much attention by developers (and is commonly not done well at all), because there isn't all that much incentive to do so.

If you're excited for Sony's exclusives though? I'd be very excited for the sound mixing in their exclusive titles (and I suspect that they'll be putting a lot of attention into it too, which is great!).  But apart from them and Capcom (Capcom always put a lot of effort into their sound mixing and almost always end up knocking their surround sound mixing out of the park), I suspect that the tech will end up going largely underutilised.

Edited March 19, 2020 by Dcubed

[Hero-of-Time]

Thanks for you thoughts on the audio, @Dcubed. Watching the video below, did you ever play Hellblade? Even I loved the audio in that game (played it with a headset on) and this is coming from someone who cares not for fancy setups and just uses TV speakers.

Digital Foundry have published a video about the specs. It's a nice companion piece to what Sony put out yesterday.

The guys seem pretty excited and positive by it all. They agreed with what Cerny said in that the number of Teraflops can't be used as a metric for power because there's so much other stuff going on under the hood. The speed of the SSD sounds like it could be a real game changer.

In terms of the marketing/messaging, I'm in the camp of thinking that they've dropped the ball here. Will it matter in the long run? Probably not. When Sony do stumble I always come back to the PS3. That was their worst generation and yet they were still able to sell a stupid amount of consoles and catch Microsoft's 360. Whether people like their consoles or not, the PlayStation home console brand is a stupidly popular one that has a very strong following, much like what Nintendo has.

At the end of the day, as long as the games are there then people will show up. Although, even that doesn't seem to be an issue at launch. PS2, PS3 and PS4 all had iffy launch titles and people still snapped up the machines. 

[Dcubed]

I haven't played Hellblade, but I've always been keen to try out its binaural audio.  I've heard some binaural tech demos with headphones before though and have always walked away very impressed; its really good tech that should be standardised at a hardware SDK level on all platforms, especially considering that most people don't have and can't accomodate full surround sound setups.

 

If Sony are smart, this is what they should be focusing on with their DSP chip.  Binaural audio is proven tech that works and works very well.

Edited March 19, 2020 by Dcubed

[drahkon]

2 hours ago, Hero-of-Time said:

In terms of the marketing/messaging, I'm in the camp of thinking that they've dropped the ball here. Will it matter in the long run? Probably not.

Yeah, none of this will be remembered as soon as Sony finally reveals the console and announces its price. The latter and exclusive games will be the deciding factor.

None of those who were disappointed with the showing (which was exactly as advertised...) will give a damn about it as soon as they know how much money they need to invest.  

Edited March 19, 2020 by drahkon

[Ronnie]

It should have just been a video they released out of the blue like Xbox did with their releases. Don't hype it up days in advance and call it "The Road to PS5". 

Unless the power disparity between PS5 and XSX is very noticeable with multiplatform games, it definitely won't matter in the end, just as Nintendo's poor January reveal event of the Switch didn't matter. 

It's just crazy how they completely blundered this whole thing. And let's not mention the digital audience pasted on top? 

Edited March 19, 2020 by Ronnie

[bob]

I think it's fairly obvious that Sony are completely fucked. They seem to have completely botched the whole affair, and it's going to bite them in the arse in the long term.

Unless you plan on getting a PS5, in which case, what on earth are Microsoft doing?! One bad business decision after another! Who would want to buy that sad excuse for a console?!

[Sheikah]

11 hours ago, Ronnie said:

I struggled through the first fifteen minutes, then gave up. People are hungry for PS5 info and that's what they put out? Tone deaf. 

I've no idea why that needed to be a 50 minute presentation to a room with 4 people in it, Xbox's various blog posts and shorter YouTube videos got the job done much better. By all means have a dev-focused video presentation... AFTER a consumer-centric one! And it's not natively backwards compatible? Seriously? I just sold my PS4 on the assumption that Playstation would have finally figured out backwards compatibility. Stupid me for assuming that. 

 

I totally expected you to be the one to not like this presentation.

A couple of points on BC -

I don't think that PS1 and PS2 BC is any way needed, and very unlikely to have an effect on the success of the console. Most people will not use it, and just like Microsoft's BC on X1, I think it's one of those things that people would praise but most people wouldn't use it or buy a console for it. While it might be a nice novelty, the vast majority aren't buying a new console to play their old games on it. BC is a great idea for the previous generation though (i.e. PS4), since it helps people transition right away. It means you can basically pack away your PS4 as soon as the PS5 releases, and play your PS4 games in boost mode.

Also, the "top 100 games PS4 games are supported" comment may mean that 100 games support boost mode, while all other PS4 games are supported (but not boosted). They need to clarify this though.

Edited March 19, 2020 by Sheikah

[Hero-of-Time]

That last point is still up in the air, @Sheikah. There was a bit of back and forth between a lot of people as to whether what you stated is indeed the case. It has caused a bit of confusion and Sony would do well to clarify what the situation is.

39 minutes ago, bob said:

I think it's fairly obvious that Sony are completely fucked. They seem to have completely botched the whole affair, and it's going to bite them in the arse in the long term.

Unless you plan on getting a PS5, in which case, what on earth are Microsoft doing?! One bad business decision after another! Who would want to buy that sad excuse for a console?!

Pretty much. I love when these reveals happen. It clearly shows which gamers have yet to grow up and get past the whole choosing a side thing. The way some have went on its as if they have stock in these consoles or something.

[Sheikah]

2 minutes ago, Hero-of-Time said:

That last point is still up in the air, @Sheikah. There was a bit of back and forth between a lot of people as to whether what you stated is indeed the case. It has caused a bit of confusion and Sony would do well to clarify what the situation is.

Pretty much. I love when these reveals happen. It clearly shows which gamers have yet to grow up and get past the whole choosing a side thing. The way some have went on its as if they have stock in these consoles or something.

Ah fair enough, edited my post accordingly. This is something they definitely need to clarify.

[Nicktendo]

17 minutes ago, Hero-of-Time said:

That last point is still up in the air, @Sheikah. There was a bit of back and forth between a lot of people as to whether what you stated is indeed the case. It has caused a bit of confusion and Sony would do well to clarify what the situation is.

Pretty much. I love when these reveals happen. It clearly shows which gamers have yet to grow up and get past the whole choosing a side thing. The way some have went on its as if they have stock in these consoles or something.

As I understand the reaction to the conference has been largely negative.

"WHERE AR THE GAEMZZ?!?!1!?"

People are stupid. Fanboys are worse. I thought it was a really interesting talk, Cerny did a fantastic job of making complex ideas easy to understand. Also, I'm really pleased that both Sony and MS seem to be taking wildly different approaches to the next gen. It's great that they're both not focusing solely on making graphics better, but trying to cut down on load times, incorporating ray-tracing (which I am a BIG fan of, those Doom 2 and Minecraft demos are INSANE), and include as much cross-gen compatibility as they can. I think the idea of having one MS machine or one Sony machine and being able to access a really wide catalogue of games is what we need. I have games in my Steam library from 2010, all of them work on my current PC, yet I can't play Wii Sports without having a heap of different equipment. Sure BC might not be the "most important" feature, but it's one I'd always prefer to have for convenience. I'd like the industry to be in a position where if you have a modern Playstation or a modern Xbox and ALL your games from all generations work. Something I feel, sadly, Nintendo will ever get close to. 

Given that the PC market has become much simpler for the average Joe to jump into and the costs (while still high) are not at the crazy levels of 10-15 years ago, the home console market has to stay relevant. I think exclusives will play a big role in that as well as being involved in the "eco-system". For now, outright power isn't really that important I think, and when it's all said and done, I think they'll be close. The games will win out in the end. Hopefully gamers will too. 

[Happenstance]

My understanding of the top 100 games comment was that all games need to be checked to see if they need any work doing to become backwards compatible (with them saying the majority were and some would need a patch) and they just used the top 100 games as a starting place.

[Ronnie]

It's most likely the same as Xbox's backwards compatibility reveal, they only announced 100 or so 360 games at launch too. That was five years ago.