According to former employee of Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games, James Cooper, the PS5 will in theory, eliminate the “crunch culture” in game studios.
In theory, the #PS5’s SSD means developers can worry a little less about level streaming and memory micro-management which is a huge time sink late on in the dev cycle and the source of many bugs. This means it might actually help to reduce crunch! Said Cooper via Twitter
Mark Cerny has recently revealed the technical specifications of the Sony PlayStation 5, one of the most praised features of the next gen console is the super fast NVMe SSD included in the system. SegmentNext provides a technical analysis of what might be Cooper’s suggestions. The outlet points at the impressive IO throughput of the console, capable of delivering 5.5 GBps of raw data and 8-9 GBps of compressed data, this would allow developers have more freedom as they would have less restrictions of system memory and level streaming.
The outlet affirms that PS5 will “definitely” reduce the crunch culture. Sony’s Mark Cerny explained that the SSD changes the way developers will create a game. Sony has targeted a 5GB/s SSD in order to potentially eliminate loading screens, but the main objective was to allow texture streaming. The PS5 will be able to stream texture in a fraction of a second.
PlayStation 5 is designed to be developer friendly, the required time for developers to learn the new programming model is under a month. A significant improvement from the 1-2 months required for the PS4 architecture.
An example of how texture streaming was given, as a player is turning around the camera in a game, the console can load the game’s texture on demand, a half second turn can load up to 4GB of compressed data, Cerny claims “that sounds about right for next gen”.
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