With E3 2020 no longer happening due to the current global pandemic, Geoff Keighley came to the rescue andannounced his own Summer Game Fest eventwhich would run over the course of the Summer months and deliver news, game reveals, and new gameplay. His first show kicked off earlier today by revealing the impressive first look at Unreal Engine 5 through a PS5 tech demo with a few members of Epic Games. Following the stunning reveal,a bit more information surrounding the technology came to light.
In a followup interview after theLumen in the Land of Nanitetech demo,Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney discussed how the engineers were able to get the UE5 engine to perform at this sort of level on the PlayStation 5 hardware. Sweeney’s response highlighted the console’s customized solid-state drive, which could be a game changers for developers within the next console generation.
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The device itself was revealed earlier in March duringMark Cerny’s GDC Deep Dive presentationinto the hardware and specs of the PlayStation 5. During that presentation, Cerny confirmed that the SSD targets storage bandwidth at least 5GB per second, an incredible jump from the PlayStation 4 hard drive which is only able to do 50-100 megabytes per second. For the Epic Games demo, this enables them to not just utilize more polygons and memory, but to also load a large amount of polygons in every frame as players walk around. That level of detail just isn’t possible without the customized SSD.
Sweeney was soimpressed by the SSD architecturethat he even admitted that the PS5 storage architecture is far ahead of the current best SSD solutions available today on a personal computer. Naturally, this advancement will also likely push the high-end PC market in the next couple of years as well.
“The PS5 puts a vast amount of flash memory very, very close to the processor. So much that it really fundamentally changes the trade-offs that games can make and stream in. And that’s absolutely critical to this kind of demo.”
For all the talk about the PlayStation 5, naturally the conversation veered towards Microsoft’s Xbox Series X. However, Sweeney wouldn’t comment about any potential performance differences between the two consoles, only confirming that the features shown today are going to work on all next-generation consoles.
Hardware specs for both the PS5 and Xbox Series X have been highly compared and contrasted by the community. In fact, Microsoft’s own Phil Spencer admitted after Mark Cerny’s presentation thathe feels good about the choices his team madefor their platform. Both consoles have their advantages and disadvantages, but figuring out which console will be stronger likely won’t be obvious on day 1. Much of that also lies in games and which really take advantage of the new technologies in both platforms, an area where Microsoft has been looking to improve in especially when compared to Sony’s big first party studios.
