This morning, reports from Wired released indicating that the PlayStation 5 could be a powerhouse of a console.
The reports states that the PS5 will have an SSD (solid state drive), backwards compatibility with the PS4, and a ton of power to push the limits of games even further.
Sony says that their next-gen system won’t be an incremental upgrade like the PlayStation Pro was to the base PlayStation 4, instead it’s going to be a completely new system that, according to the Lead Architect for the PlayStation 5 Mark Cerny, “allows for fundamental changes in what a game can be.”
Inside the console is a new AMD Ryzen-based chip sporting 8 cores as well as 7nm Zen 2 architecture. The custom GPU inside the system will be a custom Radeon Navi card that will have full support of ray-tracing. Whether or not is has the power to utilize it though is still to be seen. Although, Sony does claim the PlayStaition 5 will support 8k graphics.
On top of all the graphical power the PlayStation 5 will have, the system will also support 3D audio which Sony thinks will become the gold standard for audio.
In their demonstration to Wired, Sony also demonstrated the huge jump in speed the new system’s SSD will bring. Using the PS4 exclusive Spider-man, Cerny used a fast travel point to show just how slow loading times in games currently are. The fast travel took a total of 15 seconds.
When Cerny booted up an early “low speed” devkit of the PS5, the same fast travel took only 0.8 seconds to load.
The exact specs and manufacturer of the SSD haven’t been revealed just yet, but regardless the inclusion of an SSD in a console is extremely welcome.
Cerny also confirmed to Wired that the PlayStation 5 won’t be any sort of download only machine. The system will accept physical media just as your PS4 does now.
When speaking on cloud gaming though, Sony’s plans seem a lot more unclear.
Microsoft’s next version of the Xbox will presumably integrate cloud gaming as well to allow people to play Xbox games on multiple devices. Sony’s plans in this regard are still unclear—it’s one of the many things Cerny is keeping mum on, saying only that “we are cloud-gaming pioneers, and our vision should become clear as we head toward launch”—but it’s hard to think there won’t be more news coming on that front.
The system isn’t set to release any time soon. Currently, estimates set the console’s release sometime in 2020.
Source: Wired