Sony have released the first set of details about the upcoming console that will replaced the Playstation 4. Although it doesn’t have a name yet, the Playsation 5 seems like the obvious name to call it.
Thanks to the good folks over at Wired, we have some details on the new PlayStation console (PlayStation 5). The next generation of hardware is, potentially, make or break for console gaming. With the growth in the mobile market, growth in PC gaming, and the looming specter of streaming services on the horizon, the next piece of hardware from Sony will need to remind everyone exactly why console gaming matters. Based on the information in the Wired report, this certainly seems to be their aim.
A standout detail is that the PlayStation 5 will have a solid state drive, dramatically increasing the load times of games. This is wonderful news, especially as games get bigger and load times get more ponderous. There will also be backwards compatibility with the PlayStation 4, which is an absolute must for gamers at this point in time. Nobody wants to have to move on from a games library that they spent years building.
For those who are wondering about specs, according to the Wired article, they have some details on those as well.
PlayStation’s next-generation console ticks all those boxes, starting with an AMD chip at the heart of the device. (Warning: some alphabet soup follows.) The CPU is based on the third generation of AMD’s Ryzen line and contains eight cores of the company’s new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. The GPU, a custom variant of Radeon’s Navi family, will support ray tracing, a technique that models the travel of light to simulate complex interactions in 3D environments.
This is all great news, even if I personally remain unconvinced by raytracing, or at least it’s an application to games at this point in time. Lead system architect Mark Cerny also talked about how VR would be very important to Sony, and that the PlayStation 5 will work with the current PSVR headset.
The only downside is that it doesn’t seem that the PlayStation 5 will be arriving this year, and we will have to wait until 2020 to get our hands on it. Still, new and faster tech, much better and faster storage, backwards compatibility and continued support for expensive peripherals you have already purchased should definitely put a smile on the average Playstation fan’s face.
Be sure to read the entire story over at Wired.
