Mark Cerny reveals PS5’s hardware secrets in new video

Mark Cerny, the lead system architect of the PS5, has explained the process of creating the console in a new video.

The legendary developer whose credits include Marble Madness, Crash Bandicoot and Marvel’s Spider-Man sat down with Wired to discuss his role in creating the PS5 and bringing its systems to life.

The video gives an insight into the pre-production process of the PS5, as well as the feedback the team received from the game development community.

“We’d been getting requests for an SSD all the way back to PlayStation 4. In particular, Tim Sweeney, who is the visionary founder of Epic Games, he said ‘hard drives were holding the industry back’”, Cerny reveals.

He goes on to explain how one of the priorities with the PlayStation 5 was to improve what Cerny refers to as “so-called fast travel”.

“On PlayStation 4 fast travel can get anything, depending on the game, from 15 seconds to a minute. On PlayStation 5, much faster, anything from a fraction of a second to a few seconds. That means no more subway rides in Marvel’s Spider-Man, which is really a shame, I liked those subway rides”

Cerny also discussed the considerations that had to be made when including the PS4 library in the PlayStation 5.

“Backwards compatibility is difficult because there are hundreds of essential GPU features in PlayStation 4 that the developers rely on, and for their games to run flawlessly on PlayStation 5, each of those features need to be properly included.

“We also need to insulate the games from the new PlayStation 5 capabilities. There was a case early on where we ran a multi-million selling PlayStation 4 game on PlayStation 5 and found out that the player character was suddenly just running too fast.

“What was happening was the power of PlayStation 5 was translating into higher frame-rate and it broke gameplay. So to fix that bug we had to put in knobs that would allow us to dial-in just how much performance that game could handle.”

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Later in the interview, Cerny praises the new haptics that went into developing the DualSense controller, and how that impacts games.

“My favourite moment in Ghost of Tsushima is that sensation when you’re riding on your horse and you can really feel the difference between galloping across dirt or mud or stone.”