Sony reveals details about its next home console
Release date aside, Cerny provided more details regarding the specs of the device. As expected, the latter will boast a better CPU and GPU. More specifically, the home console will pack a CPU based on the third generation of AMD’s Ryzen line with eight cores of the company’s new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture, and for its GPU, a custom variant of Radeon’s Navi family, with ray tracing support will be embedded.
Cerny notes that the ray tracing technology will have more use than just improving on the visual aspect on this 8K-compatible device. “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.”
More than just focusing on the visuals, Sony is also laying emphasis on the audio, stating that the AMD chip also packs a custom unit for 3D audio. “As a gamer,” Cerny says, “it's been a little bit of a frustration that audio did not change too much between PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. With the next console the dream is to show how dramatically different the audio experience can be when we apply significant amounts of hardware horsepower to it.”
Of note, the PlayStation 5 will also come with a solid state drive (SSD) which will drastically improve in-game load times. During the interview, Wired had a glimpse of this when Cerny compared fast travel in 2018's Spider-Man between a PS4 Pro and a PS5 dev-kit: it took 15 seconds on the PS4 Pro while it a mere 0.8 seconds on the PS5.
Wait, that's all cool but Spider-Man is getting a re-release on the PS5?! Not quite. According to the interview, this next-gen PlayStation will be partly based on the PS4’s architecture, and will also be backward-compatible with PS4 games. Also compatible with the PS5 will be the current PSVR headset. Moreover, the next generation of PlayStation-branded console will still support physical media instead of being a download-only device.
So what do you think of the next PlayStation so far? Which features do you wish it to support and do you think Sony will implement them?
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