We’re waiting patiently for news of the next generation of consoles, but that news is slow to trickle through. Today, courtesy of Wired, we have our first taste of what to really expect. In an exclusive look at the next generation of PlayStation with PlayStation 4 lead architect Mike Cerny, the publication says that Sony has been hard at work on the new console for the last four years.
The console won’t be coming this year (instead, the oft-rumoured 2020 release is likely), and will be built on newer AMD tech. Wired says the new system will have a CPU based on AMD’s third-generation Ryzen chips, with 8 Zen 2 cores. The GPU will be a custom chip built using AMD’s Navi architecture and will support Ray Tracing. As you likely know, that’s the tech that makes Nvidia’s newest cards intriguing. Ray Tracing allows for far better, more dynamic in-game lighting.
One of the biggest changes as far as tech goes is a new 3D audio that seems to borrow from the PSVR’s exceptional positional audio.
“As a gamer, it’s been a little bit of a frustration that audio did not change too much between PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4,” Cerny tells Wired. “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.”
The new system also seems to be built around having a large, custom SSD that’ll drop load times significantly. Demonstrating the new tech, Cerny demonstrates the difference in load times in Spider-Man, dropping a fast-travel transition time from 15 seconds to 0.8.
“No matter how powered up you get as Spider-Man, you can never go any faster than this,” Cerny says, “because that’s simply how fast we can get the data off the hard drive.”
The system will support 8K TV’s (but will likely run its games in 4K) and will still have physical media. Read the full report at Wired.
Last Updated: April 16, 2019
Geoffrey Tim
April 16, 2019 at 15:00
NEW GENS! YEAH! Ray-tracing and backwards compatibility…I like it
HairyEwok
April 16, 2019 at 15:17
I’m a bit sceptic on the storage, SSD have a finite lifespan, unless cloud saving will be a thing.
G8crasha
April 16, 2019 at 15:24
As do your standard magnetic hard drives. As far as I am aware, the purported lifespans of SSDs are simply guides. I had an SSD for years, and I used my PC everyday for several hours. I only retired it when I ran out of space.
Geoffrey Tim
April 16, 2019 at 15:25
On top of that, this isn’t a standard SSD. It’s apparently a new fangled solution that has higher throughput than any Pc SSD. It does make me worry about upgrading storage though
HvR
April 16, 2019 at 16:33
It is a PCIe M.2 SSD, already becoming the standard on high end desktop and laptop.
At 3000MB/s to 3400MB/s for current PCie3 SSD is waaaaaay faster than 19 times the PS4 HHD output was around 75MB/s, so I think the dev kit got a system bottleneck at the moment.
AMD revealed that the new gen Ryzen will support PCIe 4 so suspect they are shipping with PCIe 3 SSD on a PCIe 4 bus
HvR
April 16, 2019 at 16:33
Industry standard is 3000 write cycles, more than enough. SSD will probably be the last thing to break on the console.
EDIT:
Going on average failure rates HHD is 4 times more likely to fail on you than a SSD.
Allykhat
April 16, 2019 at 15:54
As long as I can get 60 FPS, Standard. I dont care whats in the box.
Pieter Kruger
April 16, 2019 at 16:03
16 Teraflops WOW!….and Knack 3 of course…
Geoffrey Tim
April 16, 2019 at 16:34
GOTTA HAVE KNACK
Fox1
April 16, 2019 at 16:13
R10k price tag at launch at least.
G8crasha
April 16, 2019 at 15:00
I don’ even think we can truly comprehend the power that will be on offer in the new consoles. I doubt the hardware is equivalent to AMD’s current PC hardware, which is good, but not exactly killing Intel or Nvidia. If it is, that is very shortsighted, considering each console’s lifespan of about 5 years or so. Admittedly, they will most probably still make incremental increases in performance, like they did with the Pro, but yeah, interesting times.
HvR
April 16, 2019 at 17:07
No based on the new 7nm/14nm combined chipsets dropping towards the end of this year.
First time in a decade that they are ahead of Intel, a much needed win for AMD mostly due to them finally breaking ties and loyalty with GlobalFoundries and going with TSMC for fabrication