Sony announces first details on PlayStation 5
Sony today announced the first details on the next generation PlayStation system, the PS5.
The new details were announced in an exclusive article from Wired magazine. The console isn’t expected in 2019.
Here’s the highlights of the new features of the next-generation PlayStation, presumably called PlayStation 5:
- Backwards Compatible with PS4 games
- Still using Physical Media
- 8 Core AMD Processor
- Radeon Navi GPU (Supports up to 8K resolution)
- SSD and More Storage (Spider-Man loads times from 15 seconds to 0.8)
- Raytracing
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.
Raytracing is a brand new feature for the PS5, which allows better loading and scripting of environments for the platform. “If you wanted to run tests to see if the player can hear certain audio sources or if the enemies can hear the players’ footsteps, ray tracing is useful for that,” he says. “It’s all the same thing as taking a ray through the environment.”
New CPU, new GPU, the ability to deliver unprecedented visual and audio effects in a game (and maybe a PSVR sequel at some point). That’s all great, but there’s something else that excites Cerny even more. Something that he calls “a true game changer,” something that more than anything else is “the key to the next generation.” It’s a hard drive.
Sony is not hosting a E3 conference this year, so the company appears to be announcing first details on next generation platforms ahead of Microsoft’s expected news at E3 in two months.
Full details on what’s to come is in the Wired article here.