PS5’s supercharged secret weapon smokes Xbox Series X

A lot of PS5 hype has centred around its superfast SSD, allowing data to be accessed faster than any other console - including its rival, the Xbox Series X. But new information has revealed that the PS5’s SSD is even better than we thought it was – and that’s thanks to a hi-tech data compression method that the console uses.

The speed of the PS5’s storage drive is no secret. Developers have already spoken up about its power and capabilities, including Ratchet & Clank’s creative director Marcus Smith, who said it left him ‘blown away’. But Charles Bloom, a programmer at RAD Game Tools – the company which develops the data compression tools that Sony has licensed to use in the PS5 – reveals even more about the console’s capabilities.

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Bloom’s blog post is very technical, but it goes into detail about how the compression tools – called Oodle Kraken and Oodle Texture – will work on the PS5. 

In the simplest terms, Oodle Kraken works similarly to how ‘zipping’ files on your PC works. We’ve all used Winzip to make a few files smaller to send over email; Oodle Kraken and Oodle Texture do that with the files that the PS5 needs to run games, but on a much grander, fancier scale.

But where a typical zip file on your PC is only concerned with making a file smaller, Oodle also makes files faster. 

On Oodle Kraken’s official website, the technology is described as “a revolutionary new data compression algorithm that achieves very high compression ratios, but with unheard-of-fast decompression”. 

Oodle Texture works in a similar way, but specifically encodes a game’s texture files, which standard compression software can’t handle. And combined with the raw power of the PS5's SSD, it means it will load data faster than any other consumer device.

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Essentially, your PS5 game data is stored in a compressed format that Oodle can read and decode as the game loads. And it does that at blistering speeds. But those speeds aren’t the only interesting thing we’ve learned from Bloom’s blog post. 

Thanks to the same compression technology, games should take up less space than ever on PS5  – and space is a premium as the SSD is only 825GB. According to the blog post, games that fully utilise Oodle tech might take up only half the space they would if they weren’t compressed. That means you’ll be able to store twice as many games on your PS5.

We won’t see the full benefit of Oodle software right away as it’s a very new technology, but it will be used in most PS5 games in the future, and it’s a future of blistering speeds we’re very excited to see.

Source: cbloomrants

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