Sony has finally given away some details about their next generation console, by way of an interview that the console’s chief architect, Mark Cerny, has given to Wired.
In the interview, Cerny revealed numerous details regarding the consoles hardware. The CPU is based on the third generation of AMD’s Ryzen line and will contain eight cores, while the GPU is a custom variant of Radeon Navi. It’s going to support ray tracing (which no other console has done as of yet) and 3D audio, which Cerny says will “make you feel more immersed in the game as sounds come at you from above, from behind, and from the side”.
Perhaps most importantly, it’s also going to contain an SSD, which Cerny describes as both “a true game changer” and “the key to the next generation”. Using an SSD should drastically reduce load times when booting up the game or initiating a fast travel, or even when simply loading into a different area; Cerny demonstrated the difference in speed to Wired using Spider-Man running on both a PS4 Pro and a next-gen devkit – fast-travelling on the PS4 Pro took 15 seconds, while doing the same on the next-gen devkit took 0.8 seconds. I’m sure we can all agree, that is a massive, game-changing difference. How was he playing Spider-Man on a next-gen devkit, you may ask? Because the PS5 (that name hasn’t been confirmed yet) will support backwards compatibility with PS4 games, and the current PSVR headset will be supported too.
Other details are sparce, but Cerny did confirm that some games will release on both PS4 and next-gen in the early days of the new consoles lifespan. The new console will also still accept physical media (which may surprise some), and it’ll also support 8K graphics, although there aren’t many TV’s about to support that technology yet.
That’s pretty much all that Cerny gave away, and there have been no details on how the console will look or what features it will support. Regardless, it’s good to hear some hardware details, especially considering we know that Sony won’t be attending E3 this year, so we shouldn’t expect to get any PS5 details there. Incidentally, Cerny did confirm that the next PlayStation won’t see the light of day this year, but I don’t think anybody will be surprised by that news.
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