Up until now, the PlayStation 5’s main rival was thought to be Microsoft’s Xbox Series X. With the two consoles releasing in a similar holiday 2020 window and sharing many titles, such as next-gen ports of Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone, it’s easy to see why they would be compared. However, a recent statement by Tim Sweeny, the CEO of Epic Games (the studio behind Fortnite) and the creator of the Unreal Engine, denotes that the PS5 is also aiming to take on the high-end gaming PC market!
Epic Games recently released its Unreal Engine 5 demonstration, running live on a PS5. Although the software is set to debut on both next-gen consoles and PC in 2021, Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney has hinted at the PS5 leading the charge in this particular technical revolution.
Sweeney has stated that the PS5 will be at an advantage due to its enormous solid state drive (SSD), claiming that its revolutionary capabilities aren’t even seen in high-end gaming PCs. This is not just in terms of raw storage size, but also the way its memory is structured, which opens up a plethora of new gaming possibilities.
“The PS5 has an immense amount of GPU power, but also multi-order bandwidth increase in storage management,” he said during an interview after the Unreal Engine 5 live stream. We’ve been working super close with Sony for quite a long time on storage. The storage architecture on the PS5 is far ahead of anything you can buy on the PC for any amount of money right now. It’s going to help drive future PCs,” Sweeney said.
This is not a unique statement: back in March, PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny made similar claims during a tech-heavy presentation of the new technology aimed solely at developers.
Epic founder Tim Sweeney also PS5’s I/O architecture, describing it as “much more advanced than what’s currently available on PC”. However, Microsoft and the Xbox Series X aren’t very far behind, even though they have been less vocal about the new technology in the Xbox Series X recently. Microsoft’s new console features its own Velocity Architecture which is designed to ‘radically improve asset streaming’ and to ‘effectively multiply available memory’, thanks to a custom NVMe SSD (rated at 2.4 GB/s with raw data), a dedicated hardware decompression block, the new Sampler Feedback Streaming technology and last but not least, the new DirectStorage API.
It’s also important to note that regardless of how the PS5 may be better than current PCs, the PS5 is meant to last a whole generation, while new PCs with updated specs are constantly being released. It’ll only be a matter of time before yet another PC surpasses the PS5. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting development for the gaming community, and I speak for everyone when I say i’m desperate for a big reveal!
