In a surprisingly candid interview with Wired, PlayStation lead system designer Mark Cerny shared many juicy details regarding Sony’s next major console release. At this point we’re only guessing that it will actually be called “PlayStation 5,” since Sony hasn’t formally unannounced or revealed it (Cerny refers to it in the interview as “the next-gen console.” The official PlayStation twitter account tweeted the Wired article, confirming the details within.
Here are the hardware details according to the interview.
- AMD Ryzen 8-core CPU.
- Radeon Navi GPU that supports ray tracing.
- “Custom unit for 3D audio.”
- Support for PSVR.
- Solid State Drive.
- 8K resolution support.
- Disc-based games.
- Backwards compatible with PlayStation 4.
Most of these are expected incremental improvements. The biggest and most noticeable upgrade is the solid state drive (SSD). Anyone who has experience using one with their PC (or externally with a console) knows how vastly you can improve load times.
In the Wired article, Cerny uses last year’s Marvel’s Spider-Man as an example of using an SSD. Not only are fast-travel load times nearly non-existent (from 15 seconds to less than 1 second) but just moving quickly through the world is much smoother. Cerny tells Wired it’s “the key to the next generation.”
Cerny confirmed the PlayStation 5, or whatever it’s called, won’t be launching this year. But there’s an excellent chance that Sony will be formally announcing the console some time later this year. Sony is not attending E3 this year (for the first time ever). Most likely we’ll see a special Sony presentation, like their recent State of Play series.
