- Hey guys, this is Austin.
I built the PS5.
Well, sorta.
(electronic music)
So this is everything we should need
to build ourselves the Xbox Scarlett or PS5.
Now to start out with, we have AMD's Ryzen 7 3700X.
Now this is the exact same Zen 2 core
as they're in both of the next generation of consoles
and based on what we know about the PlayStation 5
with an 8-Core configuration,
this is a very close match.
With a few tweaks,
I think we can get it really, really close.
Next, we have the Radeon RX 5700.
Now this is the very first of the Navi GPU's
which again, will be found in both the PS5
as well as the next generation Xbox.
This should give us a very good idea
of how these next generation consoles will perform.
Take a grain of salt
and we can see just how close we can get
to playing games at a full 4K60 or even beyond.
Technically, this does support 8K resolutions.
These are very much the building blocks
for the next generation of consoles
so let's get this thing put together in the test bench
and see just exactly how well it performs.
Now Sony and Microsoft will almost definitely
be using a proprietary SSD,
so this is not going to be an apples to apples comparison.
What it is is by far
the fastest option that we have available
and should give us a good idea of the performance,
specifically the load times that we can expect
out of these new consoles.
So with the test bench assembled,
I now have Windows installed,
all of our games and drivers and updates all ready to go.
Now there are a couple of configuration things
which will definitely be different with the consoles.
So number one is going to be memory.
So right now, I have 16 gigs and 3400 DDR4
feeding the CPU
and the GPU has eight gigs of GDDR6.
Now, because the consoles will take advantage
of an APU style like the current consoles,
the CPU and GPU will be on the same die,
so that's going to give a bunch of power savings
and of course, on top of that,
they are going to be sharing very similar memory.
So likely it will be GDDR6,
but there's a lot of sort of ifs and maybes
because there's a lot of customization they could do.
Maybe Sony decides to put 16 gigs instead of 12.
Maybe Microsoft decides to throw some DDR4 in there
to speed up the CPU.
That is all way up in the air
so to keep things as fair as possible,
I'm trying to be conservative and give it the most
amount of bandwidth and the most amount of memory
that I think it could realistically use.
So we have Horizon 7 3700X here,
as well as the RX-5700.
Now to start, I'm going to just run
a series of benchmarks and tests,
with everything stock
because obviously, this has a advantage
of being an open air test bench,
but this is sort of the best case scenario.
Plenty of power, plenty of cooling,
and then we'll start tweaking from there.
So to start out, let's have
the good old standard Geekbench.
Now this is not going to be the most demanding test
for the CPU,
but this should give us a good ball park,
specifically on how Horizon stacks up
to, well I mean now are the current consoles,
but like Core i7's and stuff.
Oh wow, that's fast, okay.
So for context, that's actually ahead
of a core I-7-9700K multi-threaded.
It's not too far behind on single threaded.
That's a big, big step up from old Ryzen.
We do know that Sony and Microsoft have opted to go
for an AMD Navi based GPU.
So because of that, I've chosen to go with the 5700,
which is the middle of the range option.
So Sony and Microsoft will definitely customize this,
so they might actually go up toward a higher spec
such as the XT version of this guy,
or because of power strain, so they might actually
go a little bit lower performance
and they're gonna customize it with extra stuff
like ray tracing that tracing that this card doesn't have
so it's a little bit of a guess,
an educated guess,
but it's sort of, I'm hoping that this middle of the range
configuration is doable for these consoles.
So first off, we have Time Spy,
so this should give us
a pretty good idea of the performance,
although again, this is just for the first testing.
We also have a bunch of games installed
that I wanna see if we can actually get to 4K60
or 144144, or whatever the case is.
Okay, so for the graphics we have our benchmark to beat,
8,154, which if I check this chart here
is pretty similar to say RTX 2070.
I actually don't think I'm going
to tweak the graphics card too much.
I think this is going to be fairly close to what we'll get,
but I do think that there's a lot of room to bring
our clocks and specifically our power down on the CPU side.
8-Cores I think is basically a lock for the PS5
and likely for the Xbox,
but they will probably be running at a little bit closer
to say, three ish gigahertz.
My next step is to underclock our processor.
So since obviously a console has much more limited
thermal as well as power constraints compared to a PC,
I'm going to not only lower the voltage
but also lower our clock speed
to get this in the same kind of realm
as something you could expect to find
in the PS5 or the Xbox Scarlett.
So for testing, I'm using AMD's Ryzen Master software,
which props to them is super useful.
I start at 160 watts and again,
that's for the entire system,
so there's probably 70ish watts
that has nothing to do with the CPU.
But I've already come from 160 down to 135.
So I think if we keep this going,
we'll probably be in the right realm
for what the consoles can handle.
This is basically the same thing as overclocking,
except it's in reverse.
So if we lower too much voltage,
it will start crashing just the way it would
if we try to push the system too far.
So we have now crossed into my magic green threshold
of that's actually roughly console spec.
I can probably get a little bit more power out of it.
Even though I'm lowering the power,
we're still running at the same clock speed, right?
So this is literally getting the exact same performance
but just undervolting the CPU.
We're down to 34 watts.
That's gotta be good.
I think a console can pretty easily sustain that.
Okay, so I think a speed like 3.2
is very, very doable on a console.
So what I'm going to do now
is I'm gonna validate it a little bit more
and make sure that we're not going to see
any additional crashing.
And from there, it's time to actually test
to see how well this games with the console spec CPU.
So let's take a couple of games that are out right now
on current generation consoles
and see what it takes to get them running at 4K60,
maybe even 120 frames per second.
All right, so Metro Exodus is actually a fairly modern game,
so I'm just gonna jump it straight to 4K, ultra.
So where we're at right now
is that this is the Ryzen 7 3700X
which is running at 3.2 gigahertz
which is, I think, pretty close to the console spec
and we have our 15 frames per second.
Mm.
Oh, are you recording right now?
Okay, so I'm in the middle of testing Metro
and I'm getting some really weird numbers
and now I'm getting some crashing.
Which makes me think maybe I was a little bit too aggressive
with my underclock.
There's definitely some weirdness with Metro Exodus
but we are able to get frame rates that are
what I would consider to be well above
what we can get on the current generation of consoles
without any real penalties.
I mean, right now, say like 1440p seems like it's probably
going to be the sweet spot here.
If we really do wanna aim for that 60FPS plus experience.
So that is actually pretty solid.
So I'm gonna put Metro Exodus aside for a second
since that's given me lots of weird errors
and the numbers just don't make any sense,
but in Shadow of War, we've actually got 4K60.
We got a 64 frame per second run.
Now mind you, that is turning the settings down
to medium, so running on full ultra settings,
it's closer to 40 frames per second.
But this is still a big step up over current consoles.
That's reassuring.
I feel better about this entire project now.
'Cause it would suck, I'm like,
"This is gonna be the PS5!"
And then I put it together, and it's like, "Oh, wait.
"This sucks."
So the next thing I'm gonna try
is hitting 120 frames per second.
So both of the consoles should
in theory support it
and some TV's such as the VIZIO that we recently
took a look at do support a full 120 hertz.
It's super smooth and I think as long as we
probably bump things down to 1080p,
we actually might be able to hit it.
Oh, look at that.
Wow.
So literally bumping down to 1080p,
we're well above 120 frames per second.
155, 160.
And this is very much CPU dependent
because generally speaking,
with the current generation of consoles,
hitting those higher frame rates
is very difficult with their weak CPU's.
With Ryzen here, even with it being underclocked,
we're having no problems going
well, well above 100 frames per second.
That is awesome, that's actually better than I thought.
And honestly, I think it's a perfectly reasonable trade off.
If you want the higher quality you can run it at 4K
and get your decent frame rates,
but if you do have a display
which can take advantage of 120 frames or more,
then actually bumping the resolution down
to something like 1080p seems totally reasonable.
You can see all the marketing stuff
of, "Oh, it supports 120 frames per second,
"or 60 or 4K, whatever, blah, blah, blah."
But this is actually real numbers.
Now obviously, all of this video
has to be taken with a big grain of salt.
But we are working with a very similar CPU,
and the graphics, as far as I'm concerned,
are probably going to be pretty similar
to what we can expect
with this next gen console.
We have the PCIe 4.0 SSD,
which, side note, all of these benchmarks
and games and stuff have been loading really fast.
But this is very much in the sort of realm
of what I think we can really expect to see
when these consoles go on sale next year.
And that's super exciting.
The Witcher 3 is not a brand new game,
but when you start cranking it up at 4K,
it actually does get fairly demanding
even for very high end PC's.
And with the 4K resolution,
everything set to ultra, ultra, ultra,
this is probably going to be tough to run.
I don't think we're going to get a 4K60 on this.
We'll see, but, I don't have what?
What?
Oh my god, are you serious right now?
Great.
My benchmarks start with a fresh new save.
We're getting here 47 frames per second here, 44.
(laughs)
All right, nevermind, I'm glad that we started
with the beginning of the game.
You will be able to hit 4K60
if game developers wanna aim for that, right?
So that's a big question.
They still might opt to go
for either slightly higher resolutions
or more higher quality effects at 4K30.
But 4K60 very much seems possible.
So now, of course, time for the most important
test of them all.
Fortnite.
Because come on, let's face it,
Fortnite's gonna be on the PS5.
Seems to run fine.
I don't know what I'm doing right now.
We're in the 35 to 40ish FPS range
but this is full epic settings.
I think if we, why don't we just notch it down to high
it'll probably be okay.
Medium at 4K, we're at 90 frames per second.
So some combination of medium and high settings
seems to be what we need.
Who's shooting me right now?
Oh, all right.
This is not the PS5,
but as far as I'm concerned,
it is the closest look that we'll have
to the level of performance of the next generation
until the end of 2020.
Bottom line, from what I've been able to see today,
4K at a locked 60 frames per second
seems totally doable with this next generation of consoles.
Now whether or not we see high frame rates
and all the other bells and whistles remains to be seen.
But if they're anything like this,
and I have really strong suspicion
that this is a pretty decent look
at the next generation consoles
then there is a lot to be excited about.