“Well, it’s not all going to be rainbows and path tracing.”
The discussion also touches on where Sony is looking to go in the future.
As always, the text has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Mark Cerny: Yeah.
I knew there would be a lot of different strategies.
There’s a lot of research going on there.
We support one mode that covers a range of 2.5:1 to 1:1.
And whether that’s an ideal long-term strategy or not, we’re definitely talking about it.
Mark Cerny: Yeah, that fur on performance RT.
Mike Fitzgerald: Yeah [laughter].
It really struggled for me playing at home in the performance modes that we had on the base PS5.
It’s just that there’s so many targets to go up against.
So what order and what focus?
Those are really good questions.
Additionally, complicating this is that we announced Project Amethyst with AMD today.
Mark Cerny: Definitely.
Well, it wouldn’t be PSSR - PSSR is PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution.
And so it’s going to be Spectralsomethingfor all of that.
But Super Resolution is a very good place to start.
Mark Cerny: Well, there are a lot of interesting possibilities there.
And honestly, I don’t know at this time.
Just how all of those pieces fit together, I don’t know.
So there’s options there.
Mark Cerny: You’re not part of the problem.
I’ve heard you talk.
I’ve spent too much time on DF.
You really need to be looking at image quality.
Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about it at all.
The difficulty is if you don’t have a number, it’s very hard to have that conversation.
Mark Cerny: It’s a mid-generation release.
Not that complex of an approach!
Because we know that’s the future we’re heading into.
Mark Cerny: It’s really just a question of where you put your resources.
That’s kind of my litmus test.
I’m not asking, “do all the games run at 120?”
at this point in time.
I’m asking, “do all the games run at 60?”
Mike Fitzgerald: Right.
That’s a fun meeting for everyone and we were very happy with where the focus was here.
Mark Cerny: Yeah.
The strategies that we had up through PS4 Pro or the like… And so, as we look to the future, the improvements will be ray tracing.
I think we’re going to see a lot happening there.
And then everything we can get done with ML.
Mark Cerny: That’s a great question.
It’s pretty much identical.
We don’t want it to get too bulky.
We don’t want to have the fan have to be too large or the like.
So, I mean, that 2.35GHz is really a red herring.
I don’t think too many games will get up to that too often.
Mark Cerny: We’re not making PCs.
We’re making a few very specific things, right?
The Pro consoles are very tightly targeted around GPU.
What are we doing with the amount of memory?
What are we doing with haptics?
It’s a whole new experience for developers.
Not gameplay-wise, but in terms of the visual experience.
What was that like Mike?
How did you tweak the engine?
Mike Fitzgerald: Well, the nice part was that those things stacked together in a really constructive way.
The more sizable GPU came back to cut frame-times down.
And so why not spend them on improving your RT or adding a new widget or whatever?
That doesn’t happen.
You’re desperately trying to get to 60fps.
Mark Cerny: There’s two components.
It’s a deep collaboration.
Don’t expect some massive hardware announcement immediately coming out of this.
One target is more optimal architectures for machine learning.
And I look at that through a very narrow lens because we’re making a console.
But I’d also like to hear about, people want to do their AI or something on it.
Is it something that is portable?
Is it something that’s easy to create?
Because you never want to lock people into just one hardware architecture when they make that stuff.
So working on this generalised architecture that’s particularly good at the ML needs of consoles.
I suspect AMD might frame it slightly differently [laughter].
Mark Cerny: That’s my personal focus.
They’re in so many different spaces.
But I look at it as, yes, I’d love to see these things happen.
And the other part of it is for these neural networks, they are time consuming to make.
And what are those targets?
It is super resolution.
I guarantee it’s possible to do better than PSSR.
And that’s just scratching the surface of where we can head.
So it’s to develop those together.
Now, to clarify, we’re talking about developing components, not developing libraries.
Mark Cerny: It’s a great question.
But in general, the games are pretty robust when it comes to the timing.
We still need binary compatibility - all of the registers that the game was hitting need to be there.
But we don’t need whatever was taking a thousand cycles before to still take a thousand cycles.
It’s okay if it takes 600 or 900 or even occasionally 1100.
Mike Fitzgerald: Well, I think we’ve already seen it.
So we’re able to put in RTAO.
We have some RT shadows in there and places where we were bumping up against those divergence limits.
And so we’re already seeing opportunities where it’s paying off for us.
Mark Cerny: I think path tracing on PS5 Pro would be a little tricky to do.
But, you know, I wouldn’t put it past the developers.
There are some amazing engineers out there.
Mike Fitzgerald: It sounds like a challenge.
Mark Cerny: I’m happy with the launch line-up, to be honest.
We view it very simply - we’re just making tools for the developers.
How the developers use those tools, that’s up to them.
We’ve seen a couple different ways of doing it, I think right now.
Look forward to it.
