Comment by xela79 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xela79 | Hacker News Reader

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I can really recommend this tech talk regarding PS4 and PS5 hardware by their lead hardware architect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg

some really interesting topics related to what kind of performance they wanted as a baseline and how to optimize to make the PS5 do what it currently does... like no other platform.

a $700 console that:

- outputs 4k / HDR (upscaled from lower native res. ofc)

- renders games steadily at 30 / 60fps

- no hitches, framedrops

- always records your gameplay

- live video sharing of stream with PS friends

- live streaming to youtube

- updates of games being installed

- downloads of games/data

all simultaneous, instant game switches, quick loading times. the experience cannot be replicated with a 1k gaming PC, not even a $2000 machine. They really delivered a device which is imho, more than just "an AMD gaming PC with a custom GUI and some DRM"

would have loved to have widescale keyboard/mouse support, as playing Far Cry with a controller is frustrating at best. And keyboard/mouse support is in hands of the game dev if they want to support it or not.

Performance is vastly helped just by not having a fragmented ecosystem or a moving target. If I know all my customers are running my software on the exact same hardware, I can optimise the hell out of my software, and also I can see exactly how it will perform for the end user and polish the worst bits until either it's shiny enough for me or I run out of budget.

If every single user has a different setup with components chosen from a vast array of possibilities that can all do different sets of things at different speeds... well, I can get it to work on my machine, and I can try and guess what to degrade when things get bad, but ultimately I just have to throw it over the wall and hope it's not too terrible in the wild. It's impressive, really, that PC desktop games work as well as they do.

that's the case for every console ever made after the 90s; here the fact that both gaming desktop PC and consoles share similar hardware pieces makes it imho that more interesting to be able to find use cases the deliver a better out of the box experience, and have it cost a fraction of the game PC budget.

- no hitches, framedrops

This statement alone is pure bullshit. So the rest should be taken with a pound of salt.

While that one line is incorrect, it’s a fallacy to use that to try and sow the seeds of doubt in the other points. People make mistakes in wording all the time and it’s a low debate tactic to do what you did.

The fact is some frame hitches are gone but obviously not all.

The ones that will primarily be gone or largely mitigated are

- shader compilation hitches, because console versions of games can ship with pre compiled shaders.

- data transfer hitches because the consoles have shared memory and dedicated compression blocks to optimize transfer

- system resource scheduling contention because the OS and other processes won’t start interfering with the game process since they use dedicated resource allocation.

thanks, on an internet forum, you'd expect some leeway, but alas, it seems it's worse than a technical paper ;)

the OS and hardware working hand in hand to help overcome some of the causes for hitches and frame drops is what sets the consoles apart from the DIY PC builds where you simply don't have access to the custom design;

and it's also imho where in this generation Sony has pulled ahead of Microsoft even if both are using similar hardware

> the DIY PC builds where you simply don't have access to the custom design;

On Linux (or Steam Deck) you can precompile shaders for your specific hardware like Switch or PS5. There is nothing about "DIY PC builds" that prevent you from building an experience like this.

The steamdeck is a single known entity of hardware. For all intents and purposes, it can be treated like a console in that regards.

But DIY PC builds, that’s a wide range of hardware to support. And it’s not just hardware, it’s driver versions, OS versions and firmware versions.

So it’s possible to do what Valve does where the first playthrough caches the shader compilations and then stores them by a configuration hash, so subsequent users get it. But the sheer number of hardware and software permutations makes it significantly harder.

It has nothing to do with Linux either.

The shaders are therefore not precompiled in the same way they are for console. It just means that the second playthrough of a section is a shared experience taking advantage of the first users resources.

If a game hasn’t been played first, or you encounter an area of the game that hasn’t been encountered before you, or you’re on a slightly different hardware/software combination than the previous shader cache, you’ll hit the stuttering again.

That's not how Valve caches shaders on Steam. They accommodate those DIY builds by compiling them on-machine with Fossilize, converting them to system-optimized files. For DirectX titles like Elden Ring, this effectively eliminates all shader compilation stutter in-game. It also doesn't rely on fancy "first playthrough" setups, since it's translating and optimizing the original shaders wholesale.

> It has nothing to do with Linux either.

It's an out-of-box feature with Steam on Linux. You can run all of this stuff on Windows too, but you'd have to build it from source and configure DXVK environments for each game by-hand. On Linux it all happens automatically.

It’s a factor of Steam not Linux. They could in theory do it for other platforms too.

Fossilize does require at least one playthrough because shader permutations can be generated at runtime. There’s no static shader setup that’s common to all games. It just means that the first playthrough doesn’t have to be the same person playing it right now

I believe fossilize snapshots the entire pipeline configurations. It can then replay that and generate final hardware-specific binaries, not just SPIR-V, for the cache completely ahead of time.

That's much better because it doesn't matter what hardware the first person used, the data can be used everywhere.

True, the replay aspect does help as long as nothing invalidates the pipeline, which is still a higher possibility on PCs than consoles

I'm not saying that the PS5 isn't a good performer for its cost. It is also clearly cost-optimized to do exactly those features without any resources wasted on extra hardware. But at the end of the day even if an equivalent desktop computer cost 5x as much the hardware and hardware architecture look identical.

Sure, this will make emulation hard right now because you don't have the huge compute advantage that you do when emulating a PS3 on modern hardware, but you shouldn't have much difficulty matching the architecture, because it already matches. Basically a PS5 emulator can look a lot more like Wine as opposed to hardware emulation like you see for NES, N64 and similar consoles which were completely custom hardware.

it's definitely done on purpose by Sony, to have PC grade hardware so they can port their games easily to the PC platform and have a larger install base for the first party titles, which previously only existed on the Playstation. All in all, I see it as a win for end users that they are converging as the software titles are available across multiple platforms. So price competition is very relevant. In a world experience worst inflation in decades, this is a very thin silver lining for sure.

> always records your gameplay > video share > live stream

it's called hardware encoding video. it's great that those features are present, but HW encoding (even in consoles) isn't new

never said it was "new" have nvidia shadow play forever running and OBS for the better open source solution on a game PC; but that doesn't take away that the all-in-one polished end user experience is very nice and required some better planning.

PS3 multitasking performance was horrid

Consoles are a loss-leader so saying that the price is $700 doesn't tell you what it costs without including how much of a negative margin Sony was willing to take.

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