Playstation 5 details part III: What makes the PS5 better

The technology of the PS5 was unveiled on Wednesday in a tech briefing that was actually intended exclusively for developers and therefore relatively monotonous. In Part I and II of the details of the new Sony console, strategy and performance data have already been highlighted. This time it’s about what the PS5 may do better than Microsoft’s competitor product.

So far, the built-in hard drives in video game consoles have slowed down the entire system speed and even an Xbox One X has been affected: If loading times are too long and textures in the game are loaded too late, this is usually a sign that the required data is too slow Hard disk can be shoveled into the working memory of the console.

The previous solution: SSD storage. In this case, Playstation developer Mark Cerny rightly points out that you are using SSD storage on the consoles e.g. can connect via USB, but from the theoretical 10-fold speed advantage of the current inexpensive SSD storage only a factor of 2 is often left, because all transfer technology inside the consoles is not designed for such speeds (even if you change the internal PS4 hard drive, the problem persists).

Microsoft has solved the problem with the Xbox Series X by setting to current NVMe SSD storage comparable to PCs and building the entire data forwarding of the console on these transfer speeds. Additional controllers ensure that the main processors are not unnecessarily loaded when data is moved from A to B. With Xbox Series X, data from the SSD can be transferred to RAM almost 20 to 40 times faster than with an Xbox One with a normal hard drive – megabytes of data will become gigabytes of data within a few seconds. As Xbox Series X games are optimized for this, they must be installed on the new high-performance memory. Microsoft supplies 1,000 GB of internal memory and additional compact memory modules (also 1,000 GB).

The highlight: the optional memory modules can be changed quickly and easily on the back. However, the prices for these small modules will be higher than for common SSD memories. Usual USB hard drives are still sufficient for normal Xbox One games.

As fast as the Xbox Series X is, the PS5 is once again dramatically better positioned in this area: Sony promises a 100-fold increase in performance compared to a PS4 with a standard hard drive and the data transfer rate of the PS5 is more than twice as high as that of Microsoft’s Xbox Series X. Charging times should not only be reduced to a few seconds, but ideally to one second. This is made possible by a huge technical effort with the internal SSD and the control, because Sony not only wants to massively increase the data transfer speed, but also to avoid unnecessary CPU and GPU load during data transfer and at the same time to prevent any sources of error.

This, in turn, can have an extremely positive impact on the game performance and the number of frames per second, because as current PC future titles like “Star Citizen” prove, the CPU and GPU can only tap their full performance potential with the best NVME SSD memories. In this respect, the PS5 is superior to previous PC memory solutions and suitable PC memory modules that can keep up with the internal PS5 memory in terms of speed and protocol processing are not yet available. So it makes no sense to organize SSD storage in advance, because Sony first wants to use a type of certification to ensure that the PC memory is up to the internal PS5 memory.

Mark Cerny already indicated that it could take until 2021 to find comparable PC NVMe SSDs on the market. Such a second ultra-fast SSD memory can be installed in an expansion slot in the PS5. A simple exchange like with Xbox Series X is not possible and on the whole you will primarily use two ultra-fast drives with the PS5, instead of having several USB stick-like SSD modules like with Xbox Series X within reach. Since the internal PS5 memory with 825 GB is not exactly lavish and the operating system consumes several gigabytes of it, it will be exciting to see how Sony wants to avoid installing and uninstalling game data too often.

Speaking of the operating system: Due to the extremely fast SSD data transfer, Sony could outsource the data load of the operating system as soon as you started a game in order to free up more space within the GDDR6 RAM. If you press the Home button, the operating system data could be shoveled back from the SSD cache into main memory in a fraction of a second. In practice, the PS5 could guarantee superior memory usage compared to the Xbox Series X, but it remains to be seen whether Sony’s numbers will actually prove so in practice.

Good news for troubled PS4 owners: Up to now, update data has been downloaded with a fast internet connection, but installing this data can take an eternity, as the entire game data is usually rewritten. With the PS5, this is no longer the case, so that game updates no longer provoke unnecessary delays beyond the limitations of your own Internet line.

To be continued (and finale)…

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