One of the details revealed about the next generation PlayStation console is that it will include a Zen 2 CPU, which will allow for more processing power than ever before. During an interview with Gaming Bolt, Hemanshu Chhabra of Tripe-I Games talked briefly about this microarchitecture and how it will impact developers. In short, it will cut down on development time and allow developers to focus more on iteration instead of processing AI.
Chhabra and his team at Tripe-I Games are working on the upcoming action-adventure game Hindsight 20/20, which is fittingly due out in 2020. During the interview Chhabra said:
Since we are a fully 3D game that has large worlds and several characters at play, a lot of our time is spent in graphics and CPU optimizations. We wish to deliver a fluid and crisp 1080p, 60 fps experience on all consoles to our players. For a fully 3D game with large worlds, some of which have gameplay spanning over multiple hours, this is a big challenge.
Our CPU optimizations include processing the AI that we need to, limiting the scope of awareness of entities so that they only process what they need to, physics optimizations etc. Our graphics optimizations involve pooling expensive assets, batching smaller meshes and using common textures to avoid having too many draw calls, baking the lighting wherever we can, hand optimizing the shaders for different consoles etc.
For us, a better CPU and GPU would mean that we would have the luxury to spend more time creating the game. My background is in engineering and while I enjoy a lot of this optimization work, as a game designer, I would much rather spend a lot more time on building and iterating on the game and incorporating more ideas that could make the game better. I expect that for our future games, we will have more bandwidth to do so in our schedule.
This will hopefully help developers make games at a faster pace for the PS5, or at least give them more time to optimize their games. Higher bandwidth might also allow developers to incorporate more ideas. As it stands now, lots of ideas during production end up getting cut due to time, budget, or technical limitations, so the Zen 2 CPU seems like it will help alleviate some of that.
We still don’t know a lot about the next generation PlayStation. A rumored release window of fall 2020 has been thrown around a lot, but that has not been confirmed. We also don’t even know if it will, in fact, be called the PlayStation 5, as it’s only been referred to by Sony as the “next-gen console.”
The idea of saving time on the developer’s end is promising, along with all the other minor details we’ve learned about Sony’s new box. Hopefully, we’ll hear more before 2019 is over.
What do you think of the discussion of the PS5 Zen 2 CPU? Let us know!
[Source: Gaming Bolt]
