Sony is lifting the lid on PlayStation 4 development, finally revealing detailed technical information on its powerful new platform along with the philosophy that drives it. At GDC yesterday, SCEA senior staff engineer Chris Norden spoke to game developers about the core architecture that powers the new console, going into depth on the controller and camera while giving us some insight into what makes the PS4's x86 64-bit architecture a cut above your typical gaming PC.

A great deal of the presentation centred on what Norden described as "innovative, low-latency input devices" - specifically the DualShock 4 and the new PlayStation 4 Eye. While the new joypad is an evolution of the existing PS3 pad, it features the most fundamental revision of the controller we've yet seen from one generation to the next - going beyond the removal of the Start/Select buttons and the introduction of their Option/Share replacements.

"The analogue sticks have been tightened up, they feel a lot more precise than they did on the DualShock 3," said Norden. "There's a motion sensor... accelerometers, there's a six-axis accelerometer and gyroscope in there. It's better than the one in the PS3, it's better than the one in the PS Vita. You got dual vibration like in DualShock 3 except it's been enhanced. One of the cool features - we've got a touchpad, it's a dual simultaneous touch-point..."

The Return of Remote Play The ability to stream gameplay from PlayStation 4 to PS Vita was touched upon during the presentation, Norden confirming that the process of beaming gameplay from console to handheld is based in part on Gaikai streaming technologies, and that you'll be able to do this on a home network or over the internet. "Latency is going to depend on your internet connection or speed but over your home network it should be extremely fast," he said. The whole process is considerably more refined than it was on PS3. For starters, it's all hardware-driven, so there's no hit to memory, CPU or GPU. You won't need to put your console into a Remote Play mode as you do on PS3; you can activate it at any time. Gameplay is also mirrored on-screen on both PS4 and Vita - in contrast to the existing version where the PlayStation 3 can't run a video output from the main console simultaneously. Native Vita 960x544 resolution was confirmed for gameplay streaming, with Sony coming up with an innovative solution to address the lack of buttons on the handheld. "The Vita doesn't have all the buttons the PS4 has, namely the R3/R4 clicking and the L2/R2 analogue triggers," said Norden. "But we're going to provide some default system controller apps to map those to front touch-screen, back touchpad - whatever you want. You'll be able to customise them too."

Norden revealed that the touchpad has an exceptional 1920x900 resolution, and that rumble has been significantly improved in the new pad. The vibration motors in the old DS3 had a larger "analogue" unit capable of multiple levels of motion, along with a smaller one that could just turn on and off. In the DualShock 4, both motors have been upgraded to offer varying levels of vibration, defined by the developer. In terms of how the controller feels in the hand, grippier surface materials are utilised to stop thumbs slipping on the sticks, where the deadzone has been refined considerably.

Sony offered up new details on its DualShock 4 controller - specifically that the analogue d-pad, face and L1/L2 buttons are now digital only, that rumble has been upgraded and the touchpad has a 1920x900 resolution. We also discovered that the new pad is grippier, with analogue stick deadzones tightened up.

We also got confirmation that a headset will ship in the box with every PlayStation 4.

"Everybody has asked about it, it definitely helps out with voice chat, multiplayer games and everything so we decided to go ahead and do that," Norden remarked. "It's got 32KHz stereo output for two players... frequency will only be reduced slightly when you start cranking up the number of players just because of the bandwidth of the wireless. And there's a 16KHz microphone port as well. The speaker is the same high-quality output as the headset. It streams directly from the PS4 at runtime."

Few games supported it, but the DualShock 3 featured 8-bit precision analogue response not just on the face buttons but on the d-pad and L1 and L2 buttons too. This has been removed on the new controller, with the platform holder reaping the benefits of faster wireless comms with the main console as a consequence.

"They're going back to digital because nobody used them. It increased packet size, it increased latency so now we're able to reduce the amount of data we're sending back from the controller," Norden said. "We've managed to cut that latency way down and as a result the controller feels ridiculously fast and responsive."

The light fantastic Sony confirmed that the lightbar on the controller is indeed used to track player location in the room - Norden discussed dynamic split-screen with the gamer on the left automatically getting the left screen as opposed to it being allocated by default to player one, with the views shifting if players swapped sides. Similar to PlayStation Move, different players receive different lightbar colours: the first pad gets traditional PlayStation blue, the second gets a red light while the third and fourth controllers illuminate with green and pink respectively - Norden explaining that the colour choice correlates with the colours of the PlayStation symbols on the face buttons. Devs have control over the lightbar to a certain extent, so the LEDs could flash when a player takes damage during a game, for example. The lightbar also flashes while charging, with the pad able replenish its batteries even when the console is in standby. Applications for the PlayStation 4 Eye camera were also discussed in depth. Firstly, a 1280x800 resolution per camera with 12-bit colour precision and a 60Hz refresh was confirmed, although it was also revealed that developers can trade pixels for frame-rate and that, at its fastest, PlayStation 4 Eye can update at 240Hz. We initially thought that the dual cam would be used for 3D applications and while the tech can triangulate depth in this way, Norden revealed a great many other uses too - the same shot can be acquired simultaneously at different levels of exposure, for example, giving a high-dynamic range effect and boosting low-light performance, while the frame-rate of the camera can be synchronised with the frame-rate of the game. Gesture-tracking and face-tracking libraries are also being provided. Norden also hinted at Kinect-style gameplay, saying that the PS4 would support controller-free gameplay as well as custom props (reminding the audience of the old PS2 title that was bundled with pom-poms). "You can get a really good lock on items in the room," he shared. "Cards, AR markers, wrist bands, clothing, LEDs, anything you can think of, you can track - LEDs work really well because it's a nice constant light source but you can do pretty much anything." The enhanced precision of the PlayStation 4 Eye feeds back into an improved experience using the already superb Move controller: "[PS4 Eye] actually provides much better tracking than the PS3 camera. Wider field of view, higher resolution," Norden confirmed. "It's just more robust in general because there's more power. Better AR, better head-tracking, better marker tracking, better everything." Introducing the PlayStation App Sony talked about how PlayStation 4 integrates with mobile devices, revealing that it is targeting Vita, iOS and Android devices with its own project dubbed the "PlayStation App". The major aspects were described thus: Browse the PlayStation Store.

Browse your friends list.

Second-screen features ala Microsoft Smartglass activate when in the same room as the PS4.

There'll be an official PlayStation app, but publishers can create their own bespoke mobile offerings for individual games, or create a general franchise-specific app. Curiously, the camera itself comes with a six-axis accelerometer. There's an 85-degree field of view, but the sensor feeds back to PlayStation 4, letting the console know in what direction the camera is looking. If a game needs a better field of view, this data allows the developer to prompt the player into moving the camera into a better position. Sony revealed a lot of new information on the PS4 Eye dual-cam, including its ability to match Kinect in a number of ways. It even has its own six-axis sensor so the console knows where the camera is looking and whether its field of view needs to be tweaked. From a technological perspective, details on the hardware make-up of the new console were also forthcoming, with Norden going into a little more depth on the 64-bit x86 architecture from AMD ("low power consumption, low heat, eight-cores, eight hardware threads") but for those keeping up with the PS4 leaks, there was really very little new here, and nothing to contradict existing information. What was intriguing was new data on how the PlayStation 4's 18-compute-unit AMD graphics core is utilised. Norden talked about "extremely carefully balanced" Compute architecture that allows GPU processing for tasks that usually run on the CPU. Sometimes, employing the massive parallelisation of the graphics hardware better suits specific processing tasks. "The point of Compute is to be able to take non-graphics code, run it on the GPU and get that data back," he said. "So DSP algorithms... post-processing, anything that's not necessarily graphics-based you can really accelerate with Compute. Compute also has access to the full amount of unified memory." "The cool thing about Compute on PlayStation 4 is that it runs completely simultaneous with graphics," Norden enthused. "So traditionally with OpenCL or other languages you have to suspend graphics to get good Compute performance. On PS4 you don't, it runs simultaneous with graphics. We've architected the system to take full advantage of Compute at the same time as graphics because we know that everyone wants maximum graphics performance." Leaked developer documentation suggests that 14 of the PS4's compute units are dedicated to rendering, with four allocated to Compute functions. The reveal of the hardware last month suggested otherwise, with all 18 operating in an apparently "unified" manner. However, running Compute and rendering simultaneously does suggest that each area has its own bespoke resources. It'll be interesting to see what solution Sony eventually takes here.

Low-level access and the "wrapper" graphics API In terms of rendering, there was some interesting news. Norden pointed out one of the principal weaknesses of DirectX 11 and OpenGL - they need to service a vast array of different hardware. The advantage of PlayStation 4 is that it's a fixed hardware platform, meaning that the specifics of the tech can be addressed directly. (It's worth pointing out at this point that the next-gen Xbox has hardware-specific extensions on top of the standard DX11 API.) "We can significantly enhance performance by bypassing a lot of the artificial DirectX limitations and bottlenecks that are imposed so DirectX can work across a wide range of hardware," he revealed. The development environment is designed to be flexible enough to get code up and running quickly, but offering the option for the more adventurous developers to get more out of the platform. To that end, PlayStation 4 has two rendering APIs. "One of them is the absolute low-level API, you're talking directly to the hardware. It's used to draw the static RAM buffers and feed them directly to the GPU," Norden shared. "It's much, much lower level than you're used to with DirectX or OpenGL but it's not quite at the driver level. It's very similar if you've programmed PS3 or PS Vita, very similar to those graphics libraries." But on top of that Sony is also providing what it terms a "wrapper API" that more closely resembles the standard PC rendering APIs. Online gaming - with real names Sony is set to include support for a player's "true name" into online gaming on PlayStation 4. Every player has dual identities - their real name and profile picture, and a second online ID with PSN avatar. "It's kind of up to you how you want people to have access to your true name. You're going to have to explicitly enable that. Not everyone is going to see your true name by default," Norden said during his GDC talk. True names are automatically enabled and visible to any friends you import from social networks where you have already shared this information - for example, Facebook. Real identities are also shared through a process described as "true name search" which we assume to be akin to finding friends on Facebook. Outside of these two paths, these details are only shared when players explicitly agree to share them with one another. Sony also confirmed that the friends list max limit on PlayStation 3 has been increased for the new console. "The key is that it doesn't sacrifice the efficiency of the low-level API. It's actually a wrapper on top of the low-level API that does a lot of the mundane tasks that you don't want to have to do over and over." The cool thing about the wrapper API is that while its task is to simplify development, Sony actually provides the source code for it so if there's anything that developers don't get on with, they can adapt it themselves to better suit their project. This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings Frame-rate analysis of Sony's Killzone Shadow Fall Facebook upload. During gameplay, the framebuffer is fed directly to a hardware encoder, the resultant file transmitted over the internet. Our analysis shows no dropped frames at all (even dupe frames will be fed to the encoder), suggesting a locked 1080p30 update in line with what Guerrilla has said. The PlayStation 4's monstrous memory set-up was also touched upon briefly in the presentation. "The cool thing about GDDR5 is that it's extremely fast. There's crazy high bandwidth. We have 176GB/s of total bandwidth across the system. This is from GPU, CPU everything... It's a fully unified address space, unified memory. Everything can access everything," Norden said. "If you're coming from PS3 you're used to the split memory architecture, you can't quite use all of it, the speeds are really wacky on some of it. We don't have that. It's eight gigs, it's there, it's easy." We have heard that the bandwidth levels of certain components vary though. While the GPU has full access to 176GB/s, one source tells us that the CPU is more constrained at around 20GB/s - still pretty good at around two-thirds the level of bandwidth available to Intel's Ivy Bridge. However, depending on how you interpret what Chris Norden said, you could either view PS4 as having unified bandwidth levels across all components or simply that 176GB/s is the maximum level of bandwidth across the entire system. For what it's worth, leaked Durango white papers also seem to suggest that the CPU there has lower levels of bandwidth than its graphics core - and there are many, many similarities between the two next-gen consoles. From there, the discussion moved onto storage, with confirmation that the PlayStation 4 ships with a dual-layer 50GB Blu-ray drive with speeds up to 3x that of the PS3 unit. There'll be a "very large hard drive" shipped in every console. Chris Norden summed up the architecture as a "nice, flexible, powerful machine... it's easier to solve real-world problems right now. You don't have to worry about exotic code or weird asymmetric processing or anything. It's nice and simple."