from Hacker News

A Deeper Look at the PlayStation 5

by jhack on 10/8/19, 1:28 PM with 15 comments

• by danso on 10/8/19, 4:36 PM

  It's funny, as someone who grew up in the NES days (and played a little Atari and Apple ][), my reaction to every generation after the original PSX is "how could things possibly get better?". And of course, looking back now, I realize how silly I was (yes, I too bought into the hype of the PS3 "super-computer" [0]).

  But the PS4/Xbone generation seems to have truly hit a high mark in fidelity, in which there is obviously room for more realistic and complex 3D visuals (especially with VR), but in which the returns seem much more diminishing than in past generations. I would be very happy with a PS5 (though not happy enough to buy it just for this) that rendered Witcher 3 with 60FPS and slightly higher quality, and near-instantaneous load times. I'm sure I'll be wowed once again by how developers take advantage of increased graphical capabilities. But the high mark that's already been reached is satisfying enough. It helps that there's been a renaissance of great indie gaming that hand-drawn (Cuphead) and retro (Shovel Knight, Undertale, Minecraft-likes) games in which graphical rendering does not require continued leaps in next-gen graphics hardware.

  [0] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-what-...

• by wpdev_63 on 10/8/19, 4:49 PM

  "The controller (which history suggests will one day be called the DualShock 5, though Cerny just says "it doesn't have a name yet") does have some features Cerny's more interested in acknowledging. One is "adaptive triggers" that can offer varying levels of resistance to make shooting a bow and arrow feel like the real thing—the tension increasing as you pull the arrow back—or make a machine gun feel far different from a shotgun. It also boasts haptic feedback far more capable than the rumble motor console gamers are used to, with highly programmable voice-coil actuators located in the left and right grips of the controller."

  I didn't think of having haptic feedback in the ps5 controllers. It's going to be interesting on how it will turn out.

• by retSava on 10/8/19, 2:47 PM

  I think this little nugget was interesting, speaking of reducing load times:

  > To minimize [rotating harddrive seek time], developers will often duplicate certain game assets in order to form contiguous data blocks, which the drive can read faster.

  > "If you look at a game like Marvel's Spider-Man," Cerny says, "there are some pieces of data duplicated 400 times on the hard drive."

  400 times! That's a lot. I wonder to what extent or ratio the game is simply redundancy. Likely only smaller assets are duplicated.

  edit: also,

  > However, game installation (which is mandatory, given the speed difference between the SSD and the optical drive)

  I guess this means only a cursory disc check will be performed at game start, from then the rest will be from ssd. That'd be great.

• by Razengan on 10/8/19, 3:30 PM

  I'm glad somebody is sticking with a sensible naming scheme.

• by theandrewbailey on 10/8/19, 5:33 PM

  > Like the PS5, Scarlett will boast a CPU based on AMD’s Ryzen line and a GPU based on its Navi family

  > “There is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware,” he says

  It'd be great if AMD would release a PC version of that GPU soon. The market desperately needs the competition.