Tim Sweeney on PS5's Storage: „The World of Loading Screens is Over.”

Tim Sweeney, head of Epic Games, commented on the Unreal Engine 5 demo presented yesterday, which ran on PS5's devkit. In his opinion, the technology used in Sony's new console can significantly affect the way video games look like and how they are created.

Tim Sweeney praises PS5.

IN A NUTSHELL:

The UE5 tech demo presented yesterday was playable and worked on PS5's devkit;
According to Tim Sweeney, the SSD of Sony's new console is the industry's leading solution of its kind - even considering modern PCs;
The boss of Epic Games believes that the technology can significantly reduce the limitations faced by game developers.

In an interview with journalist Geoff Keighley, Tim Sweeney, head of Epic Games, the studio responsible for Fortnite, Epic Games Store and the Unreal Engine, praised the PlayStation 5 console. In his view, it's a well-balanced platform whose certain aspect stands out from all the gaming devices we know, including high-end PCs - namely, the SSD.

"Sony's storage system is absolutely world-class. Not only the best in class in the console but also the best of any platform, better then high-end PC," said Sweeney. "The world of loading screens is over. The days of geometry popping up as you're going through the game environment are ended. The resulting effect is the ability to build games that are fully immersive from start to finish, over hundreds of hours of gameplay," the developer added.

According to the boss of Epic Games, both the speed of the disk and the way it works with the processor are important here.

“[The PS5] puts a vast amount of flash memory very, very close to the processor,” says Sweeney. “So much that it really fundamentally changes the trade-offs that games can make and stream in. And that’s absolutely critical to this kind of demo.

“This is not just a whole lot of polygons and memory. It’s also a lot of polygons being loaded every frame as you walk around through the environment and this sort of detail you don’t see in the world would absolutely not be possible at any scale without these breakthroughs that Sony’s made," argued Epic Games' boss.

Interestingly, as confirmed by Kim Libreri of Epic Games, the UE5 demo that we saw yesterday was a replayable piece of code that worked in real time on the PS5 devkit.

"It's a fully playable demo. We plugged in a recorded into the back of the PlayStation 5 devkit and recorded the signal that came out of the HDMIs. It's a totally live demo and it's replayable. It's a little bit different every time you play it," said Kim Libreri.