A PlayStation engineer named Mark Cerny built a chip whose only job is unpacking compressed game files, and it does the work of nine full processor cores at once. That single chip is the reason GTA VI can drop you into Vice City with almost no wait.
The problem it fixes is old. The PS4 used a spinning hard drive that read about 100 megabytes a second. Loading one gigabyte of game world could take 20 seconds, which is why open-world games hid the wait behind elevator rides and slow doors. When Cerny ran the same fast-travel jump in Spider-Man, the PS4 took 15 seconds. The PS5 did it in 0.8 seconds, about 19 times faster.
The number everyone quotes is the storage speed. The PS5 reads raw data at 5.5 gigabytes a second, more than twice as fast as the Xbox Series X. But raw speed was never the hard part. Modern games ship everything squeezed down to save space, so the console has to open that data back up to full size before the game can use it. On a normal computer that unpacking would eat most of the processor. So Cerny gave the PS5 its own unpacking chip running a method called Kraken, and it matches what a CPU would need nine of its cores to do. Once the data is opened back up, the console moves it at 8 to 9 gigabytes a second, and on files that squeeze down well it can briefly hit 22.
The rest of the design exists to stop that flood from breaking everything after it. One chip acts like a traffic director and decides where each piece of data lands in memory. Two more small processors handle the file requests and keep track of the memory. Data comes in so fast that the graphics chip would normally trip over old leftover data sitting in its memory, so Sony added cleanup tools that wipe only the exact spots being replaced and leave the rest alone.
All of it is invisible to the player. A developer just asks for the next stretch of city and it shows up. That is why GTA VI launches November 19, 2026, on PS5 and Xbox Series X only, with nothing for older machines. The game expects a level of storage speed that a hard drive cannot give it, and the loading screen you grew up staring at quietly goes away.
@volklub@20_1NM And 2009-13 manufactured cars were even a level higher because of all parts being imported. My 2012 Polo felt way superior than a 2020-21 Polo. Localisation killed some quality, sadly. But still the cars were top grade.
@SinghPratap04 Oh. I don’t know much about it. So do we have to change our region to get it or we’ll get on the India one only. I’m not eager, Just wanna make sure I get it.
I somehow sleep better at our ancestral house in Patiala.
Last weekend when I was there, slept for two sound hours after Saturday lunch. Then another eight at night.
I know it's an old house with arches, high roofs, old-school filament bulbs and stained-glass lamps on the walls. The window ACs constantly buzz and vibrate violently when they start and shut down. Some taps leak. The kitchen does not have an electric chimney and the aroma of whatever is cooking fills the whole house. But, still gives better vibes than the best hotels I have stayed in.
@Pmkphotoworks Yea even I did it on my iPad. Performance is slightly better but otherwise it’s absolutely the same. Just the battery icon which’s changed :D