Sony Teases Details Of The Next Gen Playstation
According to a Wired story, the videogame console that Sony has spent the past four years building is no mere upgrade. Two of the biggest things that Sony revealed are that it will include a solid state drive and also have backwards compatibility with the PlayStation 4. Both are things that should be standard for any new console.
But it’s not just any SSD, PlayStation 5 lead system architect Mark Cerny claims that the SSD drive built into Sony’s next-gen console “is something a little more specialized” than what is currently available for PCs, he goes on to talk about performance:
To demonstrate, Cerny fires up a PS4 Pro playing Spider-Man, a 2018 PS4 exclusive that he worked on alongside Insomniac Games. . . On the TV, Spidey stands in a small plaza. Cerny presses a button on the controller, initiating a fast-travel interstitial screen. When Spidey reappears in a totally different spot in Manhattan, 15 seconds have elapsed. Then Cerny does the same thing on a next-gen devkit connected to a different TV. (The devkit, an early “low-speed” version, is concealed in a big silver tower, with no visible componentry.) What took 15 seconds now takes less than one: 0.8 seconds, to be exact. . .
On the next-gen console, the camera speeds uptown like it’s mounted to a fighter jet. Periodically, Cerny pauses the action to prove that the surrounding environment remains perfectly crisp.
So can we say goodbye to all load times? Who knows. As for the system architecture…
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. While ray tracing is a staple of Hollywood visual effects and is beginning to worm its way into $10,000 high-end processors, no game console has been able to manage it.
For the full run down, head over to Wired now.
