Last month, Microsoft cast the first bet on the future of console gaming when it revealed the Xbox Series X’s specs. Today, Sony showed its PlayStation 5 cards as well.
PlayStation 5 lead systems architect Mark Cerny shared a dry talk Wednesday detailing the hardware specifications of the upcoming system. Sony had previously divulged some details exclusively with WIRED: The console will support 8K gaming resolutions, a custom AMD Ryzen chip, and ray tracing, a modern rendering technique that produces hyperrealistic graphics by tracking the movements of virtual light beams. The PS5’s processor supports 3D audio, which also requires no external hardware. And thankfully, Sony’s next-generation offering will give environmentally conscious players the ability to “suspend gameplay with much lower power consumption than PS4.”
Cerny’s deep dive focused on the upcoming console’s solid-state drive, 3D audio capabilities, and backward compatibility.
“What if we could have not just an SSD but a blindingly fast SSD,” asked Cerny. The PlayStation 5 will have an impressively big, 825-gigabyte SSD, which Cerny described as a “game changer and the number-one ask from developers.” An SSD helps eliminate the sort of bottlenecks that have gamers tearing their hair out as a patch update stretches on forever. It also will hit transfer speeds of 5.5 GB per second, which could mean games loading instantaneously, comfortable patch download speeds, and, Cerny said, little to no load screens. Games’ “fast travel” might actually be fast.
Last year, Cerny told WIRED that the PlayStation 5 SSD was faster than anything available on a PC, but now he expects that better drives will flood the market. PS5 owners can also expand storage with an external drive or by installing a third-party M2 SSD.
