A brand new era of gaming consoles is because of hit the market later this 12 months, and the hype cycle for the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 has been underway for greater than a 12 months. Solid technical particulars (versus mere rumors) have been slower to reach, and we nonetheless know a lot much less in regards to the consoles than we usually learn about PC platforms and elements in the course of the post-announcement, pre-availability part. We have some top-line efficiency numbers and basic architectural info from Microsoft and Sony, however not fairly a full spec sheet.
The new era of consoles will deliver huge will increase in CPU and GPU capabilities, however we get that with each new era and it is no shock when console chips get the identical microarchitecture updates because the AMD CPUs and GPUs they’re derived from. What’s extra particular with this era is the change to storage: the consoles are following within the footsteps of the PC market by switching from mechanical arduous drives to stable state storage, but in addition going a step past the PC market to get probably the most profit out of stable state storage.
Solid State Drives had been revolutionary for the PC market, offering immense enhancements to general system responsiveness. Games benefited largely within the type of sooner set up and degree load occasions, however quick storage additionally helped scale back stalls and stuttering when a recreation must load information on the fly. In latest years, NVMe SSDs have supplied speeds which might be on paper a number of occasions sooner than what is feasible with SATA SSDs, however for players the advantages have been muted at finest. Conventional knowledge holds that there are two major causes to suspect for this disappointment: First, nearly all video games and recreation engines are nonetheless designed to be playable off arduous drives as a result of present consoles and plenty of low-end PCs lack SSDs. Game programmers can’t take full benefit of NVMe SSD efficiency with out making their video games unplayably gradual on arduous drives. Second, SATA SSDs are already quick sufficient to shift the bottleneck elsewhere within the system, typically within the type of information decompression. Something apart from the SSD must be sped up earlier than video games can correctly profit from NVMe efficiency.
Microsoft and Sony are addressing each of these points with their upcoming consoles. Game builders will quickly be free to imagine that customers may have quick storage, each on consoles and on PCs. In addition, the brand new era of consoles will add additional {hardware} options to deal with bottlenecks that may be current in the event that they had been merely mid-range gaming PCs outfitted with cutting-edge SSDs. However, we’re nonetheless coping with highly effective hype operations selling these upcoming units. Both firms are responsible of exaggerating or oversimplifying of their makes an attempt to extol the brand new capabilities of their subsequent consoles, particularly almost about the brand new SSDs. And since these consoles are nonetheless closed platforms that are not even in the marketplace but, a few of the most fascinating technical particulars are nonetheless being stored secret.
The major supply of official technical details about the PS5 (and particularly its SSD) is lead designer Mark Cerny. In March, he gave an hour-long technical presentation in regards to the PS5 and spent over a 3rd of it specializing in storage. Less formally, Sony has filed a number of patents that apparently pertain to the PS5, together with one which traces up effectively with what’s been confirmed in regards to the PS5’s storage expertise. That patent discloses quite a few concepts Sony explored within the growth of the PS5, and plenty of of them are seemingly carried out within the closing design.
Microsoft has taken the method of roughly dribbling out technical particulars by sporadic weblog posts and interviews, particularly with DigitalFoundry (who even have good protection of the…
