First Details Regarding PlayStation 5 Includes a Solid State Drive and Backwards Compatibility

Sony has revealed some of the very first details regarding the highly anticipated PlayStation 5 gaming and entertainment system. This sounds like it’s going to be pretty freakin’ cool and may end up being the ultimate gaming console.

Two of the biggest things that were revealed are that it will include a solid state drive and also have backwards compatibility with the PlayStation 4! These things are a pretty big deal for gamers! The SSD will give the system the power to match the increased and improved graphics and storage needs for the next-gen games.

The SSD drive will also dramatically speed up the loading and rendering time for the games. According to Wired, PlayStation 5 lead system architect Mark Cerny teased that the SSD drive built into Sony’s next-gen console “is something a little more specialized” than what is currently available for PCs:

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.

As far as the details on PlayStation 5's CPU and GPU, here are those details:

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.

So that’s awesome! Wired went on to note that while the “ray tracing” is primarily used for graphics, it also has some audio benefits. Cerny went on to say:

“It’s all the same thing as taking a ray through the environment. 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.”

So now gamers might be able to hear little subtle sounds in the game like enemies sneaking around.

For those of you wondering about the upcoming console’s VR capabilities, there were no details offered, but it was said that “VR is very important to us,” and don’t worry, the current PSVR headset will work with the PlayStation 5.

This is very exciting, and I guess I’ll have to start saying up my money to buy one of these bad boys when the next-gen console is eventually released.

You can read even more details about the Playstation 5 here. Do you like what you’re hearing about it so far?