Over the last few years now, there has been whispers, leaks, and speculation about the next PlayStation console. None of the information posted were concrete apart from a few articles talking about dev kits arriving to developers. Some of the information were legit, and some were, eh.. sketchy, let’s put it that way. Wired.com posted an interview with Mark Cerny, the brains behind PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita. In the interview posted April 16th, Cerny talked about the Next Generation PlayStation console. Don’t even question the legitimacy of this article, because Sony themselves posted a tweet under the PlayStation Twitter account – linking to the article.
You can’t get any more official than that.
Mark stressed that the console that Sony is reportedly shipping in 2020 as assumed, and speculated – is far from a “mere upgrade.” According to Mark Cerny, he and his team at Sony has been working on the new console since 4 years ago.
Cerny dodged the question of if this is PlayStation 5, and instead calling it the “Next Gen console.” However, he did smile. Cerny says that Sony shipped dev kits to game developers, and their first party studios are working on PlayStation 5 games. He and his team also surveyed what developers wanted from PlayStation 5.
He didn’t directly specify all the tech specs of the new PlayStation console. Instead, he confirmed that they’re working with AMD again. The GPU is going to be a monster; it’s confirmed to be a modified version of Ryzen. Furthermore, according to Cerny, the chip “contains eight cores of the company’s new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture.” The CPU is also a modified version of Radeon (AMD owns ATi, so just keep in mind they’re the same company, just different branding.) It is based on the Radeon Navi line, will also feature Ray Tracing.
I’ll go over the reasons why Ray Tracing is important in a moment, but I’ll continue on. According to Cerny, PlayStation 5 will be able to sinulate sounds from the environment – “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.” You can clearly understand why this is important because you already have some of this tech in games like Call of Duty, where sounds are detected from a distance. You’d have to code this by hand, really, so Ray Tracing takes the load off the coders’ hands and does it themselves. Same with reflections, shadows, and whatnot.
Presently, developers are able to create shadows, reflections, or any other special effects emulate realism. Here, this is a demonstration of Ray Tracing, and the differences…
You may be wondering about the loading times on PS4, and how Sony plans to solve the problem of large installs, patch updates, and other installations onto your hard drive. According to Cerny, Sony created a specialized hard drive that would speed up load times, install times, and/or other installable processes. He demonstrated to Wired how it works – clearly Cerny is excited to show off just how fast everything seems.
PlayStation 5 is not slated to ship in 2019, price has not been commented on, but Cerny says that the price is going to be enticing to players, despite the monstrous specs confirmed thus far.
