Mark Cerny interview June 2024

[the-pi-guy]

"The other thing that has been surprising is the push to 60 frames per second. Based on previous console lifecycles, I would have expected there to be a lot more games that are 30 frames per second only, just because the artwork can be so much more detailed if you have longer time to render it. Instead, the almost universal rule this time around has been the games run at 60.

"It's great from a play perspective. Gamers overwhelmingly prefer games that are higher frame rates. I just didn't expect such a departure from previous generations."

"One of the exciting aspects of console hardware design is that we have freedom with regards to what we put in the console," Cerny begins. "Or to put that differently, we're not trying to build a low-cost PC, and we aren't bound by any particular standards. So if we have a brainstorm that audio can become much more immersive and dimensional if there's a dedicated unit that's capable of complex math, then we can do that. Or if the future feels like high-speed SSDs rather than HDDs, we can put an end-to-end system in the console – everything from the flash dies to the software interfaces that the game creators use – and get 100% adoption.

"I like to think that occasionally we're even showing the way for the larger industry, and that our efforts end up benefiting those gaming on PC as well. It's a tech-heavy example, but on PS4 we had very efficient GPU interfaces, and that may well have spurred DirectX to become more efficient in response. Or to look at something more consumer-focused, I believe that releasing PS5 in 2020 with a very high-performance integrated SSD put pressure on the PC world to get their corresponding DirectStorage API into the hands of their gamers.

GamesIndustry