Sony’s PS5 is set to be smart as well as powerful, thanks to having the brains to adjust fan performance depending on how games perform.
Speaking to 4Gamer.net, Otori Yasuhiro, the head of PS5’s mechanical and thermal design team, explained that the PS5 will collect information on how games perfam after the console has been released on November 12. The PS5 will then adjust the its large fan to ensure its innards are kept sufficiently cool but the fan is running in a efficient manner.
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“Various games will be released in the future, and data on the APU’s (Accelerated Processing Unit) behaviour in each game will be collected,” Yasuhiro said in an interview translated by a ResetEra user. “We have a plan to optimise the fan control based on this data.”
Apparently, the PS5 will use a trio of temperature sensors on its main board to keep an eye on the APU’s internal temperature and then adjust the fan according to the highest temperature on the silicon slice. That should ensure cooling is carried out efficiently, which will be important give the PS5’s large size seems to come form having a huge internal fan.
Fan speeds might not seem like the most exciting parts of the PS5. However, being able to intelligibly throttle or ramp up fan speed will not only help the PS5 be more efficient, but also could boost game performance. That's because keeping chips sufficient cool allows them to run faster for longer, thus delivering better frame rates for demanding games.
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And anyone with a PS4 that’s a couple of year old will have probably encountered how loud its fans can get, especially when running games that require a good bit of graphics grunt from the current-gen console.
With games like God of War a base PS4 can sound like it’s about to take off. WIth the PS5 offering high-end audio performance as well as 10.28 teraflops of graphics power, the last thing Sony will want it the console’s fan drowning out all the effort it’s put into the likes of 3D audio tech.
And having more granular control over fan speed per game, will help ensure the PS5 is running as efficiently as possible. In a world where energy consumption is a concern for the environment, anything that allows us to use the latest tech without feeling like we’re adversely affecting the earth is a good thing.
With the PS5 mere weeks away from launching, we’ll soon see just how well Sony has engineered its new games console and if it can take on the Xbox Series X.
