i'm mark cerny lead system architect of
playstation 5 and i'm here to talk about
what we made and how we made it
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my background is as a game developer
i've worked on anything from marvel
madness in the golden age of the arcade
to crash bandicoot on the first
playstation to marvel's spider-man on
playstation 5.
40 years of development my god okay
moving on as lead system architect of
the playstation consoles i focus on the
chips on the motherboard and the
software systems that directly use them
it's very technical work but the
ultimate users of these systems are
developers trying to make games so it's
great to have worked with a lot of teams
over the years and understand a bit
about what helps them and what just gets
in their way
the first step in developing any console
is a brainstorming session the hardware
team has a list all the features that
couldn't make it into the previous
console as well as of course a number of
new ideas but there's also a longer list
and that longer list is all of the
things that the game development
community would like to see
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the ssd
we've been getting requests for an ssd
all the way back to playstation 4. in
particular tim sweeney who is the
visionary founder of epic games he said
hard drives were holding the industry
back and he didn't say hard drops though
he said rusty spinning media the game
developers wanted to get away from hard
drives because that's where all the game
data is stored i mean whatever it is
character models animation music movies
it's slow to get to and if you need
seeks meaning you have to load a lot of
little pieces of data from here and
there it's particularly slow to get to
if it takes 30 seconds or a minute to
load into a level that's just lost time
so-called fast travel that's still
taking 15 seconds or 30 seconds to get
from one side of the map to the other
side a bit of this is less obvious it's
filler it's that elevator ride that
hides the load it's that unskippable
movie it's that narrow passageway that
the player character has to slowly ease
their way through now i've been there
myself as a designer on some of these
projects where the map had to be just
these twisty little passageways whose
sole purpose was to hide the loads off
of the media on playstation 4 fast
travel can take anything depending on
the game from 15 seconds to a minute on
playstation 5 much faster anything from
a fraction of a second to a few seconds
that means no more subway rides in
marvel's spider-man which is really a
shame i like those subway rides
the big challenge of hardware is working
through the sheer number of details
involved in creating a console an ssd as
an example will the game be entirely
resonant on the ssd or is the ssd a
cache and the game is on blu-ray or some
other kind of optical media do you want
to use slc or mlc or tlc or qlc what
kind of functionality do you want to
have in your custom flash controller and
how much do you want to have in your
main custom chip developers asked for an
nvme ssd with at least a gigabyte a
second of read speed and we looked at
that we decided to go for maybe five or
ten times that speed it's always good to
have a high target there bringing the
game development community into the
hardware development process is
something that's pretty recent
historically speaking over the years
that was a dialogue that personally as a
developer i've really been wanting to
have i'm looking for the developers that
give me the hardest time and the ones
who really have strong opinions about
what it is that they need to make the
game that they've been dreaming of those
are just brutal meetings to be in but
they're good to have because at the end
of the day you're making a stronger
console we decided on a strategy we
called integrated io the biggest feature
of integrated i o at least from a
developer standpoint is invisible
compression developers have to spend a
lot of time and effort loading data in
off of media whether that's a hard drive
or an ssd with the integrated io we take
care of all of that the developers hand
off their data to our publishing tools
and then the game runtime just asks for
the data and we handle the decompression
for them we put as much functionality as
we could inside of a custom unit in our
main chip the impact of this compression
strategy is huge it varies from game to
game but a few standouts are subnautica
which is uh 14 gigabytes on playstation
4 and just four gigabytes on playstation
5 control ultimate edition which is 50
gigabytes on playstation 4 and about
half that size on playstation 5. what we
found out with the launch titles is that
for example with miles morales even
though it had added all of these high
resolution models and textures for the
playstation 5 version the playstation 5
version was actually a bit smaller than
the playstation 4 version that growth in
size from the assets had been offset by
the improved technology for compression
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the cpu
the choice of the cpu is really
important pretty much anything you see
here or feel the cpu is involved in
animation ai physics collision even
things which have their own dedicated
units like graphics or the 3d audio the
smart is still in the cpu now ideally
you just use one incredibly fast cpu but
that technology doesn't exist and so
pretty much any device you use your pc
your phone your console generates the
necessary performance through using
multiple cpus simulating something like
new york city is really complex
particularly when you consider that
every pedestrian needs their ai and
their animation all executed at what
might be 60 frames a second 8 zen 2
cores really makes a difference there
the impact of those 8 cpu cores can also
be felt in return battle scenes there
are
literally thousands of bullets in flight
destruction all-stars is using zentu's
power for vehicle deformation and
destruction the physics involves quite a
bit of cpu processing there's lots of
options for core count the question is
how much of your custom chip you want
going into cpus and how much you want
going into the gpu when we did our tour
we had some devs that would really like
16 cores but game development is so
graphically oriented that when we
explained that we could do that but the
gpu would get smaller
they'd instantly back off
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the gpu
as a player you immediately notice the
characters in these games hair eyes skin
facial animation let's see where this
thing will take us we've come a long way
from what could be done on playstation
one
gpus are fiendishly complex there's
features that are added year after year
after year and this has been going on
now for two or three decades when we
talk to developers most of the
conversation is about gpus about this
alphabet soup of features that are
incredibly important to the graphics
engine programmers they're looking for
more performance they're looking for
more flexibility in how they use that
performance they're looking for new
features and they're looking for
modifications to the features that they
already have we ended up with a
customized amd radeon rdna2 gpu capable
of running at 2.23 gigahertz and 10
teraflops that's 10 trillion floating
point operations a second as well as
having a custom cutting edge feature set
epic games have created a new software
technology called nani that focuses on
the detail that the new hardware
technology enables the idea behind this
technology is that no matter how far you
zoom into something no matter how close
you get to something you're still seeing
like the real world more and more detail
we made a lot of customizations to the
gpu some of them are smaller like when
playstation 5 crashes it's a lot easier
to track down the source of that crash
than it was on playstation 4. some of
those customizations are giant like
backwards compatibility with playstation
4. backwards compatibility is difficult
because there are hundreds of essential
gpu features in playstation 4 that the
developers rely on and for their games
to run flawlessly on playstation 5 each
of those features needs to be properly
included we also need to sometimes
insulate the games from the new
playstation 5 capabilities there was a
case early on where we ran a
multi-million selling playstation 4 game
on playstation 5 and found out the
player character suddenly was just
running too fast and what was happening
was the power of playstation 5 was
translating into higher frame rate and
it broke gameplay and so to fix that
particular bug we had to put in knobs
that would allow us to dial in just how
much performance that game could handle
ray tracy
without a doubt the most exciting new
gpu feature is ray tracing one of the
big uses of ray tracing is global
illumination in metro exodus light's
streaming through a window it hits the
floor it hits a wall and that bounce
light is what illuminates the scene
another big use of ray tracing is
reflections like being able to see
spider-man reflected in the buildings
that he's crawling over it's an
impressive effect but it also shows why
a new pipeline is required if you look
at the 50-year history of games it
splits pretty neatly into two eras the
first era pac-man sonic the hedgehog is
games that are built entirely out of
flat components the second era crash
bandicoot uncharted these are games
built out of 3d triangles with effects
on them thanks to ray tracing we're now
entering a third era and the visuals
have a capacity to be like nothing we've
ever seen before ray tracing is
radically different technology it's pure
computation there's a database in ram
that contains a description of the video
game world mostly triangles and boxes
and then there's support in the gpu
hardware for seeing if a line intersects
that geometry if the hardware is fast
enough that unlocks new approaches to
lighting and shadows and reflections the
catch is to use this as a developer you
have to build a whole new real-time
graphics pipeline ray tracing was not
one of the key features that the
developers asked for mostly i think
because they had difficulty believing
they'd have enough ray tracing
performance to do anything interesting
with it you can view it as a trade-off
how much effort does it take to adopt
that new rendering pipeline versus how
much difference does it make visually to
what the player is experiencing
developers immediately dug into the new
feature set and at our very first
playstation 5 game showcase we had six
titles that were using raytracing ray
tracing can also be used for shadows in
the real world the edges of shadows are
not perfectly crisp because the light
that casts those shadows isn't a point
the light source itself has a size to it
call of duty black ops cold war uses ray
tracing and a lot of additional
mathematics to create very realistic
looking shadows with the proper softness
tempest 3d audio tech
one of the new features that we're very
excited about in playstation 5 is 3d
audio and 3d audio is like nothing
you've ever heard before the best way to
experience it is with headphones
conventional stereo audio feels as if
the sound is coming from inside your
head with 3d audio it feels as if it's
coming from the world around you
we wanted 3d audio to be something that
anyone can experience something that
would work with ordinary headphones that
you might already own or with tv
speakers we also wanted to be sure that
there were no trade-offs for the game
developers we didn't want to put them in
the position of for example having to
choose between having more enemies on
the battlefield and supporting 3d audio
our solution for all of that was a
dedicated 3d audio unit in our main
custom chip
the custom engine that drives tempest 3d
audio tech supports hundreds of sound
sources and each sound source can need
massive amounts of floating point
calculations
luckily we have a way of doing that gpus
are extraordinarily good at floating
point calculations so what we ended up
using for 3d audio is a compute unit
just like the ones in the gpu but this
time customized for 3d audio part of
what we do with 3d audio is create a
sense of locality which is to say that
you have a very good idea of where the
sound is coming from 3d audio also
creates a sense of presence which is to
say a feeling that you are immersed in
the world of the game
presence creates a lot of possibilities
for the game director and artistically
where they want to take the game to
create that feeling of presence took
quite a bit of technical learning rain
can't just be a rain sound that's being
replayed instead it needs to be
synthesized from a dozen dynamic 3d
audio sources surrounding the player
dual sense wireless controller
just like the target for audio was to
bring in more of your sense of hearing
the target with the dual sense
controller was to bring in more of your
sense of touch we did that in two
different ways we added haptics to bring
the player more into the world of the
game explosions footsteps and we added
the adaptive trigger to bring you more
in contact with what you have in your
hands like anything else there's a lot
of different ways to incorporate those
features into a controller so we did
massive iteration on it the haptics that
we ended up with in the dual sense work
by playing tailored vibrations through
the controller those can be sent to the
left side or the right side which gives
you additional feedback about what in
the world of the game that you're
interacting with those vibrations aren't
audio but they are mostly in audio
frequencies and so typically they are
created by the sound designers the
haptics also really bring home what your
feet and hands are doing sometimes
that's obvious like in spider-man you're
shooting webs sometimes that can be
surprising though my favorite moment in
ghost of tsushima is that sensation when
you're riding on your horse and you can
really feel the difference between
galloping across dirt or mud or stone
the other big new feature in dual sense
is adaptive trigger you can feel what
the player character is holding in its
hands the way we do that is by changing
the resistance of the trigger is it easy
to pull is it hard to pull we can also
make it feel like the trigger is
fighting you with previous controllers
alt-fire required a different button or
a different button combination but with
dual sense we can achieve that
functionality by looking at how far the
player is pulling the triggers in return
for example you select from one of two
firing modes whether you shoot a basic
shot or the doom bringer depends on how
much you depress the trigger
death loop has a really interesting use
of adaptive trigger when your gun jams
you can feel it immediately in the
controller or when you're out of bullets
there's no resistance you just get a
click because there's two triggers with
separate control and also the haptics
are independently specifiable for the
left and right side of the controller
dual wielding works quite well you can
really feel the weapon that you're
holding in each hand
[Music]
that completes the tour of the
technologies behind playstation 5. at
the end of the day we're providing tools
to game creators and as for how they
choose to use those tools well the fun
starts now
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