Mark Cerny has, for the first time, gone into detail about some of the more technical aspects of Sony’s next generation system. The PlayStation 5 will see massive updates and improvements to its CPU – moving it to the third generation AMD Ryzen. This should allow for greater AI and more seamless open worlds. The GPU will support ray tracing, which to date has only been seen in more high-end PC graphics cards. The combo chipset will also contain a custom unit for 3D audio, which Cerny was keen to emphasize as an area which needed improvement over the current generation.
“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.” – Mark Cerney
Beyond the new chipsets, Sony is also looking at solid state drives to drastically improve load times. In practice, this means that Spider-Man running on the new devkit slashed load times from 15 seconds on a PS4 Pro, to an impressive 0.8 seconds.
Another feature, which players are sure to embrace, is the fact that the PS5 will be backward compatible with PS4 games. In addition, the PlayStation 5 will run games in 8K, so now we just have to wait until 8K becomes standard on (affordable) TVs (Yes, I am already wanting one).
Source: Wired
