Sony has finally unveiled official details about the PlayStation 5. In an exclusive interview with Wired, Sony’s Lead System Architect Mark Cerny divulges most of the technical details that hardware junkies have been waiting for. You can check out the feature for yourself right here, but we’re going to go ahead and break everything down for you below.
Before I offer up my own opinion, let’s get the important stuff out of the way. What kind of CPU and GPU are we working with, here? Per the report, “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.”
If that reads like gibberish to you, this is all you need to know: This is a true generational leap in computing power. This won’t be like going from a PS4, to a PS4 Pro, to a PS4 Pro Plus. The leap in CPU speed here is truly significant, as is the raw horsepower and efficiency offered by a custom-tailored Navi GPU. The article mentions that the PlayStation 5 will be capable of 8K output. How’s that for future-proofing?
Don’t worry, though. It was also revealed that the PlayStation 5 will be backward compatible with the PS4, and the new console will be compatible with the original PlayStation VR as well. Everything you own right now will be fully playable on Sony’s next-gen console.
Another major upgrade that deserves significant attention is the SSD drive, which has been designed specifically for this console. Rapid read and write speeds should not only eliminate long loading times, but also offer significant boosts in performance.
Cerny booted up Marvel’s Spider-Man on a PS4 Pro, and demonstrated how a fast-travel sequence involved about 15 seconds of loading. On the PS5 dev-kit, that was reduced to about 0.8 seconds. Faster loading will also allow developers to introduce larger worlds. The upgrade is so significant, that even Cerny isn’t sure how it will change the gaming landscape; we’ll have to wait and see what developers can do with this new potential.
Sony revealed all of this, and more, by tweeting out the wired article this morning. The PlayStation 5 won’t be launching until 2020, but now that the cat is out of the bag, we can’t help but assume that Sony is building up to a spectacular official reveal. We’re expecting big things for this year’s PlayStation Experience, but we’ll keep our ears to the ground in the meantime. Stay tuned.
