From The Verge: Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says next-generation gaming consoles, in particular Sony’s PlayStation 5, will bring about changes in game development that go far beyond a jump in graphics quality. During a press briefing for the company’s newly announced Unreal Engine 5, which is optimized to work with next-gen consoles, Sweeney says the PS5 is a “remarkably balanced device.”
“It has an immense amount of GPU power, but also multi-order bandwidth increase in storage management. That’s going to be absolutely critical,” he says. “It’s one thing to render everything that can fit in memory,” he adds, but a much more impressive feat to render a world that “might be tens of gigabytes in size” almost instantaneously, as Sony’s new console and its M.2 solid-state drive are promising.
“We’ve been working super close with Sony for quite a long time on storage,” he says. “The storage architecture on the PS5 is far ahead of anything you can buy on anything on PC for any amount of money right now. It’s going to help drive future PCs. [The PC market is] going to see this thing ship and say, ‘Oh wow, SSDs are going to need to catch up with this.”
The new drive, which Sony claims is faster than any on-market device available right now, won’t just make load times almost nonexistent, but will also enable developers to access the data their games are composed of with unprecedented speed. The result is larger game worlds loading much faster than ever before, which could result in drastic changes to how developers approach everything from balancing visual quality and performance to level design.
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