Epic Games’ new Unreal Engine 5 tech demo last week that gave us our first demonstration of a game running on the PlayStation 5, and offering a glimpse at what next generation gaming will truly look like. Incredible film level detail, natural lighting, no stuttering, no lagging and no popups.
While on paper the PS5 lacks some of the raw power of highest-end PCs or the Xbox Series X, the main advantage it has been touting has been its storage solution – one that allows software developers the tools to make next-gen detail possible.
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney spoke with Digital Foundry about that UE5 demo and says that Sony’s new console could teach most PCs a thing or two, offering high praise for its architecture and its “God-tier storage system which is pretty far ahead of PCs”. He explains in his video interview:
“[The PS5] has an immense amount of GPU power, but also multi-order bandwidth increase in storage management. We’ve been working super close with Sony for quite a long time on storage. The storage architecture on the PS5 is far ahead of anything you can buy on the PC for any amount of money right now. It’s going to help drive future PCs.”
The Xbox Series X has a throughput of 2.4 gigabytes per second, as does almost all PCs with NVMe SSDs today. The PS5 on the other hand has 5.5 gigabytes per second, and as the tech presentation the other month demonstrated – Sony has effectively eliminated many of the bottlenecks that still reside between the key components of the system. Could completely redesigned motherboards and mandatory PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD drives be the next big thing in PCs?
Sweeney allows that with “a high-end PC with an SSD and especially with NVMe, you get awesome [Unreal 5] performance too.” We’re a while away from Unreal 5 hitting as it is going into preview for other developers early next year and will only be available from late next year – meaning we won’t see UE5 games until 2022 or 2023 most likely.
Sony is expected to unveil some new games, including the potential first titles for PS5 along with a first glimpse of the console’s new look, in the first week of June. One possibility that is being strongly rumored this week over at Inverse is an “Arkham”-style game involving Marvel hero Daredevil.
