The last few months has had some interesting rumors regarding Sony’s next console. There was nothing really confirmed but stories swirled around backward compatibility, digital only, and a full reveal around e3. Earlier today, however, we received a nice surprise. Peter Rubin of Wired.com sat down with Mark Cerny, lead architect of the PlayStation 4. The meeting largely covered what we should expect from Sony’s next console, presumably the PlayStation 5. We don’t have a launch window or hard specs yet, but Sony did confirm not to expect it in 2019.
A few highlights from the meeting. First, the CPU running the PS5 will be based on AMD’s Ryzen chip with 8 cores while the GPU will be based on the Radeon Navi family. The GPU will support ray tracing that can create realistic images due to how it handles light in a 3D environment. Helping support the CPU and GPU will be an SSD drive. A demonstration of Spider-Man for PS4 was shown on the PS4 Pro. In it, they demonstrated the difference between the PS4 Pro and the SSD with a fast travel transition. The PS4 Pro loaded from the two locations in about 15 seconds. With the SSD demonstration, the same transition was 0.8 seconds.
Since the PS5 is based on the PS4 architecture, we can expect it to be backward compatible, which is a good thing. Right now current consoles are in a hot market with the current trend of battle royale games. Continuing to play those games on a new console won’t alienate players or shrink the fan base. No word yet on when we should expect a full reveal, but for now what little information we know sounds promising.