How PlayStation 5 Was Built (feat. Mark Cerny) | WIRED

Key Takeaways

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 [Music] 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 [Music] 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 [Music] 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 [Music] 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 [Music]