Published , by Donovan Erskine
Published , by Donovan Erskine
One of the biggest next-gen announcements came last week during an Epic Games showcase. The company revealed Unreal Engine 5, the next iteration of their iconic gaming engine. Following the reveal of Unreal Engine 5, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney spoke at length about the next-gen technology that enabled his team to take their engine to the next level.
The Unreal Engine 5 demo is running on a PlayStation 5. The comments that Sweeney made about the PS5’s storage architecture being ahead of what’s currently on PC sparked debate about the capability of these next-gen consoles vs good old PC’s. This, of course, prompted Sweeney to respond with a series of tweets.
When asked why they ran the demo on a PS5 rather than a PC, Sweeny replied “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.” He goes on to praise the PS5’s I/O architecture, as it allows both hardware and software to work together to “minimize latency and maximize the bandwidth that's actually accessible by games.”
In his series of tweets on the matter, Sweeny goes as far to say that the future of PC data transfer technology will be improved, thanks to the advancements being made by next-gen consoles. He cites the number of steps cluttering the data transfer process as what’s currently holding PC’s back. This includes reading RAM in order to get compressed textures video memory, decompressing said software, and then “calling into a GPU driver to transfer and swizzle them.” Following PS5’s lead could make for much more efficiency in the technology overall.