Sony has finally whipped the covers off the PlayStation 5 – well, mostly. We still don’t know what the thing itself actually looks like, but we got a pretty good peek under the hood. The PS5 is set to be a massive improvement over the PS4, with a powerful new graphics processor and "instantaneous" load times.
It turns out the talk was originally scheduled for the Game Developers Conference (GDC), which would have been held this week were it not for COVID-19. Instead Mark Cerny, lead system architect at Sony, took to the stage in a somewhat dry, corporate presentation.
He revealed the PS5 is running on an 8-core AMD Ryzen Zen 2 CPU, and an AMD Radeon RDNA 2 GPU. The latter boasts 10.3 Teraflops of processing power – by comparison, the launch PS4 had only 1.84 TFLOPs, and the PS4 Pro had 4.2. That’s backed up by 16 GB of GDDR6 RAM.
The stale old hard disk drive (HDD) has been swapped out for a solid state drive (SSD), with 825 GB of storage space. That’s a bit of a strange number, so we suspect that it might be a 1 TB drive with 175 GB already taken up with system data.
This SSD, coupled with the specially designed architecture, should speed up the console dramatically. Because the data is accessible immediately, the system and the games should boot up ultra-fast, and in-game load times between levels or lives should be basically non-existent. Cerny jokes that developers might even have to artificially slow it down, so players don’t get confused about what’s happening.
In numbers, the PS5 SSD has a target bandwidth of about 5 GB per second – a huge step up from the PS4’s 100 MB/s. That means that it’ll take just a quarter of a second for the console to load in 2 GB of data, when starting a level for example. It takes the PS4 20 seconds to load just 1 GB.
The powerful new GPU enables those levels to look their best. One of the main technologies is ray tracing, where the path of light is traced as it moves through environments, producing realistic reflections, shadows and filtering.
A similar system is in place for audio, precisely modeling sound waves in a technology Sony calls Tempest 3D AudioTech.
While we haven’t heard anything definitive about specific games yet, we do know physical copies will come on 100-GB Ultra HD Blu-ray discs. Around 100 of the top PS4 games will be playable on the PS5 at launch, and Sony says that number will expand over time.
Also absent from the presentation was any mention of price or release date. So far all we know is that it’s due out in the 2020 holiday season, and if we had to guess we’d say November. No doubt we’ll get more info throughout the year – and maybe one day we'll finally see what the thing itself actually looks like.
Check out the full, almost-hour-long presentation below.
Source: PlayStation Blog
