Welcome to the 39th edition of Digital Foundry Direct Weekly – the regular show where the team downs tools for a couple of hours to discuss the latest gaming and technology news, share details on their projects and field questions from backers of the Digital Foundry Supporter Program. This week's offering kicks off with reaction to a new video from Wired with Mark Cerny discussing how the PlayStation 5 was built. It's an interesting talk, albeit one that's very similar indeed to the now iconic Road to PlayStation 5 albeit with the benefit of a year's worth of game titles that better demonstrate and emphasise the PS5's features. It's also a timely reminder of how Sony turned things around after the complications of PlayStation 3 – to double-down on communicating with developers and giving easier access to the hardware's potential.
Despite covering off most of the bullet-points from the older talk once again, there are still some interesting nuggets of new information and integrated I/O is a great case in point. Cerny points out that Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales on PS5 has much the same storage footprint as the PS4 version, despite a wealth of new asset data. In many other cases, PS5 versions of PS4 titles are much, much smaller. It serves to stress that the SSD is not the be all and end all of the PS5's storage solution, hardware decompression blocks make a genuine difference to throughput and Cerny calls it 'invisible compression', effectively allowing developers access to highly compressed data with no visible impact to performance in unpacking it. There's more to come with PS5 and variable refresh rate support – VRR – is coming in 2022, based on the SDK roadmaps we've seen.
