After the glorious reveal of Unreal Engine 5 running on PS5, Epic Games’ CEO Tim Sweeney had a lot of questions to answer regarding the new engine. Speaking with Geoff Keighley on a Summer Game Fest meeting, Sweeney talked more about the PlayStation 5’s hardware capabilities (particularly the custom PS5 SSD) and how they will usher in a new era of gaming.
We also have some quotes from an interview with Venture Beat in which Sweeney reiterates just how fast the custom PS5 SSD will be, in turn helping developers in loading in high-quality assets faster than anything found in the PC market, or even the Xbox Series X.
“Sony has done an awesome job of architecting a great system here. It’s not just a great GPU, and they didn’t just take the latest PC hardware and upgrade to it, following the path of least resistance. The storage architecture in PlayStation 5 is far ahead of anything that you can buy in any PC for any amount of money right now. It’s great to see that sort of innovation. It’s going to help drive future PCs. They’ll see this thing ship and realize, ‘Wow, with two SSDs, we’ll have to catch up.“ – Tim Sweeney in an interview with Venture Beat.
We broke down the PS5’s hardware capabilities after Mark Cerny’s deep dive on the same a couple of months ago. While some fans were a little underwhelmed with the PS5 GPU outputting “only” 10.2 Teraflops of GPU compute, the conversation around its SSD and I/O technology was much more positive. By this point, we all know about the PS5’s immensely fast SSD, and Tim Sweeney reiterated that in the interview.
“If you look at previous generations, you had to deal with magnetic disks, the lowest common denominator,” Sweeney said. “You couldn’t count on a lot of bandwidth supporting scenes like this. You had a beautiful scene and a long loading time, and then another beautiful scene. That disrupted the game experience. Our aim for the next generation is nothing but seamless, continuous worlds, and to enable all developers to achieve that. You can have this degree of fidelity going on for as many kilometers and gigabytes as you want.” – Tim Sweeney
Sony plans to release the PS5 sometime in Holiday 2020, with Unreal Engine 5 coming in 2021.