Sony Did A Fantastic Job With PS5 on the Revolutionized Storage, Says Tim Sweeney - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 October 2020 / 2,784 Views
Sony is betting big with their next generation console, the PlayStation 5, with its storage. The console comes with a custom solid state drive that will drastically improve load times over current consoles.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney in an interview with EDGE magazine and transcribed by Wccftech said he had started talking with Mark Cerny about the next generation of consoles. He says Sony did a great job with the PS5 and its revolutionary storage.
"It was three or four years ago at least when we started to talk with Mark Cerny about possibilities for the next-generation," said Sweeney.
Sony really did a fantastic job of implementing a new platform around that realization that storage could be revolutionised. PS5 is built not only on a huge body of flash memory, but also a very high bandwidth and low latency framework for accessing it, and for getting it to wherever you need for any type of work.
Nick Penwarden, VP of Eginnering, added, "This is the major innovation with the next-generation of console hardware. They have faster CPUs, they have faster GPUs, and that was really important to be able to achieve the visuals that we showed. But the biggest change across console generations is absolutely going to be the I/O bandwidth that we're able to achieve with the SSDs that are in next-generation consoles."
Sweeney added, "It's a key unblocker for what Brian Karis and the team have built here [with Nanite]. Rendering micropolygons from a 20-billion polygon scene is hard enough. But actually being able to get that data into memory is a critical challenge.
"And as a result of the years of discussions and efforts leading up to that, it was a perfect opportunity to partner with Sony to show that effort finally coming to fruition on the PS5 with pixels on the screen."
Brian Karis, who came up with the Nanite technology in Unreal Engine 5, later in the interview added the speed of the storage is critical in making what was seen in the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo a reality.
"It's an analogue to a computer science sort of approach of virtual memory," said Karis. "The concept is that not all of the data you want to access needs to actually be in RAM, it can be in a much larger space where some of it is off on disk and only when you access things does it need bring it into memory and have that stuff be actually resident.
"It's in the form of textures. It's actually like, what are the texels of that texture that are actually landing on pixels in your view? So it's in the frustum. It's stuff that you're actually seeing that's front-facing, it's stuff that is not occluded by something else.
"It's a very accurate algorithm because when you're asking for it, it's requesting it. But because it's in that sort of paradigm, that means that as soon as you request it, we need to get that data in very quickly - there needs to be a very low latency between the ask and the receive or otherwise, you're going to see really bad pop-in."
The PlayStation 5 will launch in Holiday 2020, while Unreal Engine 5 is set to launch in 2021 for multiple platforms, including the PS5, Xbox Series X and PC.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Could they stop the sales pitch, at some point? All of them! Just keep up showing the games, that will be enough.
Totally agree
I dunno why anyone would think it's not a sales pitch, considering the stuff MS is wanting to do with XSX, and Timmy boy hasn't said a damn thing about their efforts being brought to the table, let alone their use of UE either.
Timmy's clearly taking sides here, and must still hold some petty childish grudge against MS (like they currently do with Android/Valve).
@Charzore - Tim has most likely been paid by Sony as that's why Sony had the UE5 tech demo showcase, and he might still be under contract. MS doesn't look like they have the right to mention UE5 until that deal is finished since Hellblade 2 showed its being made for UE on its reveal instead of UE5 which was clarified recently via tweeter.
@Bonzinga
No one really knows if he was paid by Sony or not. He may, simply, be genuinely impressed with PS5 hardware and all the tweaks and customizations they did to make the system benefit from the super fast SSD. He may also hasn't got the chance to test xbsx and explore it's full potebtia and that's why he has nothing to say about it. No one knows, but I would just wait and see when both consoles are released to compare them. Speculation won't get anyone anywhere.
We have been going down this path for awhile with partially resident textures, but it's nice to see the technology becoming a reality now that new hardware is capable of allowing us to use it to such an extent.
Its very impressive tech, good to see companies push limits, however that's only half the job, the 2nd part of the job is to showcase it and support it. If support is not there, then it becomes another Cell Processor.
Good praise for it. And now we are drawing closer to more length demonstration of what the machine is capable of.
Can we peal off those side disks and use them as frisbees?
