PS1 to PS5 Graphics Evolution: 1994 - 2020 PlayStation Graphics History

the original sony playstation launched in 1994 over 25 years ago with it came a full embrace of 3d based graphics you could buy and play from the comfort of your home a newcomer in the video game business fueled by a falling out with nintendo the playstation brand has risen through the ranks playstation 2 the most successful video game console ever playstation 3 the slow start but rewarding finish playstation 4 back to the basics and now playstation 5. let's take an in-depth look at the graphics evolution and technologies that power these machines up to the present day [Music] with the first playstation it was a monumental and impressive leap in graphics quality not only to consumers but also video game developers as well it was an oddly exciting time despite sony executives initially laughing at the idea of entering the video game business many developers were impressed with the company's hardware at the time when developers were working on the sega saturn early dev kits were large three by three foot steel welded cubes that would hum under your desk whereas ps1 kits were the size of a lunchbox the playstation utilized a number of new standards and advancements for home consoles notably 3d graphics and the use of cd-roms for cds this meant a lot of data could be stored and used amping up the visual quality with detailed texture mapping and increasing the overall length of games not previously seen before this was largely why many publishers at the time embraced cds and the playstation like when screenix famously shifted final fantasy 7 to the ps1 over the n64 cds could store so much more data than cartridges and you got cd quality sound as well with 24 channels of 16 bit adpcm samples though cds did have one massive disadvantage and that's loading times unlike cartridges you couldn't load data on the fly relying more heavily on the console ram to bring in the assets that you need but for ps1 some of the notable graphics capabilities you could achieve were garage shading and even playback of full motion video good thing i got you out of there when i did now back to you and me are you there sir alfred not now there seems to be an emergency sir as i was saying extra my love [Music] come here you silly gekko the use of fmv is certainly a product of its time but many games still make use of this today for the ps1 it had an extra processor just for handling full motion video playback see back then incorporating real-life footage was a way of blending the game together to give it a sense of realism despite the obvious difference nowadays we can play games and not even realize we've transitioned to gameplay but back then you knew many games even utilized pre-rendered assets for static backgrounds where once again you can immediately see the drastic difference in visual detail now grow shading is where you see a more smooth looking appearance this is so each vertex has its own light level that appears more natural versus flat shading it uses linear interpolation to produce a gradual lighting effect across polygon meshes and works wonders for a number of games where it makes the most sense actually here's a little fun fact the original playstation mascot was a flat shaded character called polygon man and when the father of playstation ken kudragi first saw him he was furious because he wasn't garage shaded polygon man was no more until a surprise appearance in 2013's playstation all-stars battle royale as the final stage [Music] ps1 was home to some of the earliest uses of a technique called level of detail this is where multiple versions of a model are made with different levels of image quality these are used relative to where the player is and how far they can see if you're close to an object you get the highest quality version of a model whereas if you're far away you get a low quality version but because it's so far away it still looks pretty good this was adopted in the late 90s and is still used today as a staple to efficiently handling assets and games but ps1 still had its fair share of limitations notably the warping textures whether the game was in motion or not you'd see this effect frequently things like z buffer and fpu were totally absent from the system's architecture so you'll clearly see textures that have no real depth value warp with camera movement or the exact point of pixels snapping to the adjacent pixel with no smooth transition lighting and shadows were also commonly baked right into textures if a character model looks like they're casting a shadow it's actually just part of the model itself all in all when looking at something like polygon counts this can vary widely depending on the game but models on ps1 were typically in the neighborhood of a few hundred [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] then comes the playstation 2 offering a very noticeable jump in graphics quality with ps2 dvds were now utilized offering greater storage capacity over cd-roms sony went with a fairly exotic custom cpu they called the emotion engine and with it a custom gpu called the graphic synthesizer all things considered texture resolution and lighting saw a huge upgrade but this came at the expense of a more obtuse work environment for developers getting code up and running took more than twice as long on the playstation 2 versus the original playstation but the results for the year 2000 were very impressive the name emotion engine largely came from sony's messaging that graphics weren't just going to get better but that character models could now truly convey their emotions without even speaking something like an eyebrow hunch or a smile would be complex and demanding to do on ps1 but this was going to play a big role in ps2 games [Music] one of the best visual showcases for the playstation 2 was silent hill 2 where real-time shadows were adopted for a game that heavily relies on atmosphere this was crucial the dark environments fully flexed shadow casting against objects with the flashlight and it created one of the most immersive horror experiences ever up to that point and it highlights one of the more prominent features of the ps2's architecture the vector processing units these are two additional processors that are great for assisting the cpu and gpu for a number of tasks a great utilization for them would be procedural generation and this is what creates the wonderful fog effect present in silent hill 2. with dvd storage and the spec bump we saw games really open up on the playstation 2 in a big way beyond just visuals open worlds were just that open pivotal games like grand theft auto 3 demonstrated just how much larger games could be jack and daxter was an early example of a linear game that appears open world notably for making sure that from start to finish the player would never see any traditional loading screens a huge accomplishment given the continued use of optical disks as the primary storage mechanism [Music] however this large graphical jump was mostly due to high resolution textures a lot of the old development tricks on ps1 worked reliably on ps2 so leveraging things like diffuse color and putting lighting effects into textures was still the norm for the entirety of the ps2's life cycle more advanced tools like normal maps and specular maps were not widely used and even available to ps2 hardware for polygon counts character models were generally in the range of the low to high thousands ps2 could handle an overall real-world performance of three to 16 million polygons per second whereas ps1 was around 180 to sixty thousand [Music] so [Music] once the seventh generation of consoles came with the playstation 3 included this is where game development started to employ a number of new methods that really shifted the way textures were made this era of course introduced another massive leap once again with hd highly internet connected consoles sony chose to up the storage medium once again using blu-ray discs as their optical format they could hold up to 50 gigabytes of data and every ps3 shipped with a hard disk drive as standard allowing developers to lean on installs if necessary for their projects the caveat was sony cpu and gpu ps2 was difficult to work with and ps3 was that times two the cpu is called the cell processor and the gpu is the reality synthesizer this was essentially an asymmetric multi-threaded architecture where you had one main power processing element and eight additional processors called spus the power processing element would not be enough for most games so developers would have to leverage the spu's to handle other tasks they're like purpose built number crunchers and they're extremely good at handling all those extra tasks like lighting physics and sound unfortunately this took a few years for developers to really get comfortable with it but sony's first party developers led by example of how to best work on the god of platform the true warrior does not hide poseidon leave the sea and face me you have disrespected the gods for the last time kratos [Music] textures were approached differently for the majority of this generation normal mapping is very common and this is a technique used to mimic lighting across bumps or dents on the surface of an object combine that with specular mapping which gives off the appearance of shininess and you've got a much more convincing visual effect for your graphics and for a lot of artists this is where the pipeline started to shift the way textures were made and put into games took much longer using sculpting tools like zbrush this is why the general dynamics of the industry changed for this generation budgets were absolutely soaring and it took much longer for projects to finish if your game wasn't pushing the limits of the hardware you didn't stand much of a chance no matter when you released this is why we saw a departure for a lot of middle tier developers and publishers though on the flip side we saw the introduction of smaller teams finally able to publish on consoles through things like the playstation store and xbox live [Music] these games found their place with a lower budget and cost the consumer but for aaa despite the advancements there were still some drawbacks at the end of the day baking lighting and shadows in the textures were still common specular maps were fairly limited until the end of the life cycle and many games in this hd era were often limited to a 720p output sometimes even lower for playstation 3 you saw a lot of games often run at lower frame rates but 30 was still the expected target for most games across the life cycle ps3 character models were generally now in the tens of thousands of polygons with the hardware's polygons per second pushing past 10 million in real world performance [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] in comes the playstation 4 and sony has learned a lot from their mistakes on ps3 and ps2 shying away from exotic architectures ps4 was an x86 based machine leaning on over 30 years of development history gone would be the absurd time it took developers to get usable code running on the platform instead of six months to a year on ps3 it would be back to ps1 simplicity just a couple of months with a custom jaguar cpu and a custom amd gcn gpu and high speed unified memory ps4 was meant to be a developer friendly console from the very onset and the results definitely showed as ps4 games reached a new high of visual fidelity on consoles this is when physically based rendering or pbr became the norm pbr essentially is a way to render graphics so that objects materials vegetation all accurately reflect light the end result is a much closer step into photo realism and this is where we see just how important lighting has always been to the look and feel of a game in generations prior lighting has been a lot of guesswork putting it into textures and trying to even it out between all the different elements and scenes of a game this was a problem with something like specular mapping where you can apply it to everything and have it look off or separate it by objects and have the environment look uneven while all the advancements over the years helped lighting can still be very intensive on hardware and pbr offered excellent performance with modest costs combine that with the heavy adoption of subsurface scattering and you've got some of the most visually stunning games you'll ever see subsurface scattering being a way of simulating how light passes through objects so this applied directly to something like the skin of characters once again inching closer and closer towards photo realism what's happening we're not those kids anymore we're not and we got nothing to prove this generation also ushered in higher resolutions where ps3 games normally did 720p and under ps4 titles were typically hitting 1080p 30 frames per second was still heavily leaned down to push visual fidelity but 60 frames per second did find its way into more games than what we'd normally seen in previous consoles which brings us to our first major outlier in the traditional console model and that's the playstation 4 pro a system which by and large is still a playstation 4 with updated specs thanks to an upgraded cpu gpu and new sdk features ps4 pro could output supported games at higher frame rates and or higher resolutions native 4k for modest games were possible but titles that really pushed the hardware would rely on a technique called checkerboard rendering this is where a portion of the scene is displayed in a checkerboard pattern and algorithms would fill in the rest the screen is then smoothed out with an anti-aliasing filter for a picture quality that is very similar to true 4k this was also coinciding with a system software update that enabled all ps4 models to use high dynamic range for supported televisions this is where the contrast is broadened and a wider color gamut is used brights are brighter darks are darker and different shades of grey can be accurately depicted but with all platforms there were limitations and for ps4 it's a problem that goes all the way back to the very first playstation and that's memory management the departure from cartridges to optical disks meant you could no longer load data on the fly ps1 introduced long load times and this was present all the way to ps4 nowadays games see very large installs on the hard drive to speed up this process but the seek time for assets still bogs down game design for the last 25 years we've seen games designed around this very bottleneck where we often play a game and take a long elevator ride or walk through a corridor with a lot of twists and turns this is actually in place so the next section the game can load but overall ps4 was designed for ease of development and making the hardware affordable from day one the result was a system with a fantastic price to performance ratio character models on ps4 reached the 100 000 mark and polygons per second in theory could reach over a billion but real world performance varied widely so this was likely in the 10 million plus range similar to ps3 but again highly dependent on the game [Music] [Music] [Music] um [Music] and that brings us to today the playstation 5. sony has continued their philosophy from ps4 going with an x86 architecture and a custom cpu and gpu from amd ensuring that developers have an incredibly simple work environment the time it takes to get usable code working is now less than a month even better than ps4 and ps1 ultra blu-ray discs are now utilized which will offer 100 gigabytes of storage but the real upgrade here is a highly customized solid state drive this sleep represents a 100 times speed increase from ps4 when it comes to loading in assets the ssd uses a 12 channel custom controller that prioritizes data in parallel essentially the ssd almost acts like a secondary giant pool of ram for example on ps4 you load in all the assets a player could potentially see in 30 seconds whereas on ps5 in theory you could have assets ready to go in one second game design is now open fast travel is actually fast and load times are reduced substantially when it comes to graphics ps5 utilizes a new unit called the geometry engine and this is a two-fold feature to the hardware on one end this allows you to program without utilizing any new features as if it were a ps4 and on the other end you can take advantage of all the new techniques that are introduced one of them being primitive shaders with that as an example level of detail can now feature smooth transitions instead of just automatically switching between models based on where the player is there's also a mirrored amount of advancements in particle effects and special effects introduced as well i have to stop this this generation is solving another 25 year problem and that's lighting ps5 features hardware accelerated ray tracing and this is a very intensive technique that can trace the path of light and simulate its effects on objects in the game world this runs in real time as in it's no longer necessary to put your lighting directly into textures this doesn't mean every game will utilize it but it is here we're also seeing mega scans being used in unreal engine 5's technical demonstration and these are very high resolution 3d scans that utilize pbr and we're seeing ones typically reserved for tv and film being used in this demo the result is assets that can total over a million drawn triangles and scenes that can include billions all without the need to bake in normal maps this massive leap in textures without relying on old tricks is due in large part to not only more powerful hardware but being able to load everything in so quickly in consoles prior memory management is what kept everything in front of you within its budget ps5 ssd can remove a lot of this necessary mindful management and cram much more into any given view however in practice we don't know with complete certainty where developers will trend to for game development there will be different pipelines for different teams exploring all the advantages and disadvantages of the hardware at the end of the day every advancement has a cost and over time we'll see what that really looks like but for now playstation 5 games look incredible and it really is eye-opening to see just how far consoles and graphics technologies have come over 25-year plus history from the original playstation thank you so much for watching this video i hope you've enjoyed it if you haven't yet of course please subscribe for the best playstation news reviews and updates that are here on youtube you can follow me on twitter at mysticryan and that is it i will see you on my next video you take it easy [Music] you

Channel: Mystic

Views: 1,551,390

Keywords: PS5, PlayStation 5, PS5 gameplay, PS5 games, PS5 graphics, Evolution of graphics, PS5 5g, PS5 hbo go, PS5 showcase, PS5 reveal, PS5 games gameplay, PlayStation 5 games, PlayStation 5 gameplay, PS1 graphics, PS2 graphics, PS3 graphics, PS4 graphics, Sony, Consoles, Console gaming, Console graphics, Evolution of PlayStation

Id: eed54VQAS04

Length: 23min 32sec (1412 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020