Sony reveals PlayStation 5 hardware specifications

[Irien]

A few thoughts...

The high speed/no bottlenecks nvme SSD could be a game changer - I tried a large samsung SSD in PS4pro and it made negligable difference because the console was bottlenecked by CPU etc. Custom hardware to alleviate those bottlenecks is a big step forward, but one that has no equivalent in PCs right now.

Xbox series X has some bottleneck reduction, but only PCI-E 3 perofrmance levels (2.5-3GBps).

Games developers, for the most part will be developing on PC, which will lack any of this bottleneck reduction. Sure, high clock, high core count CPUs with high memory bandwidth/cache may offset this somewhat, but most devs will be targetting consumer SSD level hardware (ie. SATA 600 MB/s) because of available hardware. I suspect the "game changer" aspect will only apply to first party titles as a result.

MS showed the tech being used for fast game switching, which I think is a more tangible use of nvme performance right now. Indeed, MS presentation seemed a bit more grounded in reality than Sony did. BTW, I play more-or-less equally on Sony/MS/Switch (and to a lesser degree PC), so no axe to grind.

We've heard about 3D audio hardware from different companies for nearly as long as PC 3D accelerators have been available. Yep, I had an aureal A3D card alonside my original 3DFX! Each time (Aureal, Creative, Nvidia nforce, AMD trueaudio etc) it has promised the world, and eventually fallen by the wayside due to practical issues and, ultimately dev/player apathy. Maybe Sony will be the ones to push it through, but with only headphone support at the moment, I remain sceptical. The consumer hifi/AV market has standardised on Dolby Atmos / DTS:X, and I suspect anything else would be a tough sell. But, kudos to Sony for trying something new

Both companies are already "apologising" for their small storage (ie. no larger than current gen consoles). Does not bode well. Both my Xbox and PS4 have (mostly full) 4TB drives, and with backwards compatibility, that's only going to rise. Fortunately backwards compatible games can be run from USB.

Also, both are apologising for "only" 16GB by claiming that data can be read in "instantaneously" to remove the need for stale data in RAM. Sounds great, but also sounds like devs will need to change the way they design games. I suspect if one of them had bitten the bullet and gone 32GB, this would be a non-conversation. Both consoles mention 8K in specs, but don't talk about it - 16GB (13GB usabale) will be far too paltry for that - Control (current gen) uses 18.5GB of video memory alone for ray traced 8k.

However, for the price - I can't wait!

[spacein_vader]

We've heard about 3D audio hardware from different companies for nearly as long as PC 3D accelerators have been available. Yep, I had an aureal A3D card alonside my original 3DFX! Each time (Aureal, Creative, Nvidia nforce, AMD trueaudio etc) it has promised the world, and eventually fallen by the wayside due to practical issues and, ultimately dev/player apathy. Maybe Sony will be the ones to push it through, but with only headphone support at the moment, I remain sceptical. The consumer hifi/AV market has standardised on Dolby Atmos / DTS:X, and I suspect anything else would be a tough sell. But, kudos to Sony for trying something new

Aureal didn't fail due to consumer apathy, Creative Labs filed frivolous lawsuits against them (which Aureal won,) till they ran out of money, then bought the patents and promptly EOL'd the API sp as not to disturb soundblaster sales.

[QuorTek]

They can sell it at very good prices due to the amount and size of the order, also its the production of something you do not need 10 different variants of... so they can give a huge order on something and dump the prices to fit into the margain, expecting it to cost around 5-6K DKR... or around uh 500-550£ not bad, and also with this for both consoles, then AMD again sets the standard for gaming.

[DanceswithUnix]

Games developers, for the most part will be developing on PC, which will lack any of this bottleneck reduction.

Unless they have lots of RAM that the operating system can pre-fetch into. Or a big VRAM buffer they can fetch textures into. Or for the wealthy, optane.

SSD IOPS is only really an issue for the ram starved who don't already have the data where it needs to be.

[lumireleon]

come on guys they will simply update it after 3 years with 24 gigs of RAM and add an S at the end to lure the consumers deeper into the tunnel