In 2024, the ninth generation of consoles will reach half of its lifespan. Therefore, PlayStation designer Mark Cerny decided to take stock.
In an interview, he said that it now takes about four years to create a console. This is a lot because it is a process in which architects try to anticipate the future and design the best possible hardware.
“One of the interesting things about designing console hardware is that we have the freedom to choose what we put on the console. In other words, we're not trying to make a cheap computer and we're not bound by any particular standards, so if we decide that sound can become much more immersive and multi-dimensional, if there is a special block that can perform complex mathematical operations, we can do it . And if fast SSDs rather than hard drives seem to be the future, we can put a complete system in the console – everything from flash arrays to the software interfaces that game developers use – and get 100% acceptance.”
“I like to think that from time to time we show the way for the entire industry and that our efforts also benefit those who play on PC. This is a very high-tech example, but on PS4 we had very powerful GPU interfaces that could make DirectX more responsive. Or, to look at something more consumer-oriented, I think the PS5 coming out in 2020 with a very high-performance integrated SSD will put pressure on the PC world to get a proper DirectStorage API into the hands of gamers.”
The creation of new hardware is expected to help developers reduce the time it takes to start working on games.
In an interview, Cerny also admitted that he was surprised by , what developers are now paying attention to when creating their products.
“I was very surprised at how actively developers use ray tracing. It was a serious decision, and actually quite late. Initially I thought it wouldn't be very popular, but if you look at generations, and a generation lasts about seven years, software takes ten years to develop, so later in the life cycle you start to see people using the technology. Instead, we had games that used it. smoothness, that is, the number of frames per second.
“Another amazing thing is the desire for 60 frames per second. Based on previous console lifecycles, I would expect there to be a lot more games running at 30fps simply because the graphics can be much more detailed if you have more time to render them. Instead, the almost universal rule this time around is games running at 60 frames.
This is great from the point of view of ease of play. Gamers overwhelmingly prefer games with higher frame rates. I just didn’t expect such a departure from previous generations.”.
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Cover author: GI. Cover source: GI