SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
I think the directive to shut up and let the games do the talking likely came from Cerny himself. I could tell from his interviews with Richard that he was getting a bit annoyed by Richard's refusal to let the variable clocks go. I think this exchange in particular sealed the deal and forced Cerny to go into a self-imposed sabbatical.Except this thread was on fire for well over a year BEFORE the systems even released with many folks arguing that the Xbox Series X was the more powerful console and would run games better than PS5. Any discussion about "efficiency" over raw power and the advantages of higher clocks were quickly dismissed. Seriously if you were to try to convince the unsilent majority here a year ago that PS5 would actually have a slight edge in multiplatform performance comparisons, many would have not even entertained the idea! Just funny in hindsight....I have been saying that the 2 would have a negligible performance difference for nearly 2 years so no news here.
What is really interesting here is the approach Sony is taking this generation when it comes to marketing and positioning. Anyone notice that after 2 in depth Wired previews and the "Road To PS5" GDC talk, we haven't heard a peep from System architect Mark Cerny on PS5 hardware? What's the story with the PS5 geometry engine? What about more details on the I/O subsystem and it's advantages? How about those ear pics to get custom 3D audio profiles?
The truth is that after the Road to PS5, Jim Ryan was pissed at how it was received and how many forums (such as this one) were igniting console wars and misinterpreting key information. 10TF vs 12TF, confusion on Backward Compatibility, lower clocked CPU, and of course the whole variable frequency fiasco . No Bueno for the team at PlayStation. It wasn't due to lack of confidence in the system they built, they just didn't like the narrative vs the competition and wanted to regain control over the discussion. So what does Mr. Ryan do? Effectively he silences Mark Cerny (and others internally) and focuses the discussion on where it belongs: on the games! How many times have we heard Mr. Ryan say in various webcasts/State Of Play and interviews over the past year: "It's time to let the games do the talking". That's exactly what Sony is doing now.
Forget the TFLOP count, clock speed, fixed vs variable, RDNA versions and all that other BS. What do the games say? How capable is this machine? How does it compare to the competition? Based on the games themselves (which is what matters), Sony can proudly say "Very Well"
There's likely more to discover about how boost will influence game design. Several developers speaking to Digital Foundry have stated that their current PS5 work sees them throttling back the CPU in order to ensure a sustained 2.23GHz clock on the graphics core. It makes perfect sense as most game engines right now are architected with the low performance Jaguar in mind - even a doubling of throughput (ie 60fps vs 30fps) would hardly tax PS5's Zen 2 cores. However, this doesn't sound like a boost solution, but rather performance profiles similar to what we've seen on Nintendo Switch. "Regarding locked profiles, we support those on our dev kits, it can be helpful not to have variable clocks when optimising. Released PS5 games always get boosted frequencies so that they can take advantage of the additional power," explains Cerny.
But what if developers aren't going to optimise specifically to PlayStation 5's power ceiling? I wondered whether there were 'worst case scenario' frequencies that developers could work around - an equivalent to the base clocks PC components have. "Developers don't need to optimise in any way; if necessary, the frequency will adjust to whatever actions the CPU and GPU are performing," Mark Cerny counters. "I think you're asking what happens if there is a piece of code intentionally written so that every transistor (or the maximum number of transistors possible) in the CPU and GPU flip on every cycle. That's a pretty abstract question, games aren't anywhere near that amount of power consumption. In fact, if such a piece of code were to run on existing consoles, the power consumption would be well out of the intended operating range and it's even possible that the console would go into thermal shutdown. PS5 would handle such an unrealistic piece of code more gracefully."
P.S Dont blame Richard for prodding and asking hard hitting questions. Just wish he did that with MS engineers as well. Especially after the results we have seen since launch.
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