Earlier in the year, Epic Games showed off their newest engine, Unreal Engine 5. People swooned over it, as it looks pretty darn good and all as it aims to get us one more step closer to the fabled photorealism many companies chase. As much as people have swooned over the tech demo, it seems Epic Games is swooning on Sony’s next system, the PS5, more specifically that sweet SSD action.
The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has been very high on the system and how it uses its SSD. But speaking to VG24/7, it seems he wasn’t the only one as Nick Penwarden, VP of Engineering at the company, also hyped up praise on it, even revealing that they had to rewrite parts of Unreal Engine 5 with the PS5’s SSD utilization in mind, meaning that the system had a direct impact on how the engine was built.
“The PlayStation 5 provides a huge leap in both computing and graphics performance, but its storage architecture is also truly special,” he said. “The ability to stream in content at extreme speeds enables developers to create denser and more detailed environments, changing how we think about streaming content. It’s so impactful that we’ve rewritten our core I/O subsystems for Unreal Engine with the PlayStation 5 in mind.”
The PS5’s SSD capabilities has been a big talking point ever since the system’s specs were unveiled in a GDC-themed talk from Mark Cerny. How well that will actually translate to game design is something we’ll just have to wait and see as time goes on. Sony has yet to officially unveil their next system.