Mark Cerny Surprised by Rapid Ray Tracing Adoption on PS5

Recently, Mark Cerny, the lead architect of the PlayStation 5, was interviewed by GamesIndustry. During the interview, Cerny shared his views on the current state and future of the gaming industry.

Mark Cerny

When discussing surprises in modern consoles, Cerny expressed his astonishment at the widespread adoption of ray tracing technology. He said, “I have been very surprised by the degree to which developers are using ray-tracing. Putting that in, that was a big decision and actually a rather late one. I thought that this is not going to get much use initially, but if we look at generations, and a generation is seven years or so, software is created for ten years, and so later in the lifecycle we will start seeing people using that technology. But instead we had launch titles that were taking advantage of it. I guess, having worked on games for consoles that were a bit difficult to get into, like the PlayStation 3, I can be a little skittish about very deep technology like that. But in this case, my guess as to how things would go was totally wrong. And I am so happy to have seen the early adoption of the technology.”

Cerny was also surprised by the prevalence of 60 frames per second (FPS) gaming. He had expected that most games in this generation would continue to run at 30 FPS to maintain visual quality, but now almost all games offer a 60 FPS mode, providing a significantly different gaming experience compared to 30 FPS.

When discussing the differences between consoles and PCs, Cerny noted that consoles often feature specialized technologies because their design allows for the incorporation of any desired functionality. For instance, they can design an end-to-end system for the console, enabling developers to optimize their games better. He also believes that consoles can sometimes set the direction for gaming hardware development. For example, the high-performance SSD in the PS5, introduced in 2020, pressured the PC gaming sector.

Regarding PS5 game porting, Cerny mentioned that it is simpler than most people think. However, running PS5 games on a PC may require higher performance from the CPU and RAM.