Tim Sweeney explained on Twitter why he considers the PlayStation 5’s SSD and I/O architecture far more efficient than what we see in PCs.

Sure, there are already SSDs on the market for PC that can reach as high I/O speed as the PlayStation 5 (5.5 GB/s), but the story has far more than that. Let’s see what Sweeney wrote: „Systems integration and whole-system performance. Bringing in data from high-bandwidth storage into video memory in its native format with hardware decompression is very efficient. The software and hardware stack go to great lengths to minimize latency and maximize the bandwidth that’s accessible by games.

Those PC numbers are theoretical and are from drive into kernel memory. From there, it’s a slow and circuitous journey through software decompression to GPU driver swizzling into video memory where you can eventually use it. The PS5 path for this is several times more efficient. And then there’s latency. On PC, there’s a lot of layering and overhead. Then you have the issue of getting compressed textures into video memory requires reading into RAM, software decompressing, then calling into a GPU driver to transfer and swizzle them, with numerous kernel transitions throughout. Intel’s work on non-volatile NVDIMMs is very exciting and may get PC data transfer on a better track over the coming years,” the founder and CEO of Epic Games said.

In short: Sweney believes the PlayStation 5’s architecture is much more simple, efficient, lean, and thus faster than what we can see in PCs. It will benefit the Unreal Engine 5, whose tech demo we discussed in detail last week.

The PlayStation 5 will arrive in late 2020, and the Unreal Engine 5 will become available in late 2021.

Source: WCCFTech

Please support our page theGeek.games on Patreon, so we can continue to write you the latest gaming, movie and tech news and reviews as an independent magazine.
Become a Patron!