The developers will have an easier job when it comes to optimising their games – perhaps this is the „secret sauce of the PlayStation 5.”

„Developers don’t need to optimise in any way; if necessary, the frequency will adjust to whatever actions the CPU and GPU are performing. 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. 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,” Mark Cerny, the lead system architect of the PlayStation 4, the PlayStation Vita, and the PlayStation 5, told DigitalFoundry.

He also confirmed that the PlayStation 5’s devkits support fixed clock speeds, but all PlayStation 5 games will support the SmartShift-based technology (taken from AMD’s laptop hardware; this is basics behind the varied CPU and GPU clocks): „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.”

How did Sony manage to reach such boost speeds on the GPU and the CPU? The answer is simple: „One of our breakthroughs was finding a set of frequencies where the hotspot – meaning the thermal density of the CPU and the GPU – is the same. And that’s what we’ve done. They’re equivalently easy to cool or difficult to cool – whatever you want to call it,” Cerny added.

The PlayStation 5 should launch this Holiday season, and the pricing might be competitive against the Xbox Series X, which is said to get agile with its price, but it does pack more power on paper than Sony’s hardware.

Source: WCCFTech

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