There has been a heap of speculation surrounding Sony’s next-generation of PlayStations. Some believable, some were just nonsense and some just seemed underwhelming. Well, details released via wired.com put our minds at ease, confirming a slew of details about the PlayStation 5, excluding its release date.
We’ll start with the specs and what they mean:
- CPU is a custom eight-core CPU based off of AMD’s upcoming 7nm Zen 2 architecture. The 7nm is a very important part. For the uninformed, 7nm is the lithography, which is the average distance between the transistors. This is something that plays a major part in both power and efficiency, a facet which is hugely important in squeezing as much power into a console. The eight cores is also a very important part. Many games and developers are beginning adopt APIs and engine which scale very well across multiple cores (a prime example is DOOM), favouring the core count more so than clock speed (something which makes good performance for consoles much more achievable). To add to this, it’s also possible to partition cores for specific purposes, meaning that things like video playback recordings and OS processing can be done without a big hit to a game’s performance.
- The GPU is based off AMD’s upcoming Navi architecture. We haven’t really seen or heard too much about Navi, all that I really know is that it is also using a 7nm lithography, which is just as beneficial. The Navi architecture is expected to be incredibly powerful, especially seeing how hard AMD was able to push their current Vega technology with the Radeon VII. To add to this, AMD have already confirmed they figured out ray-tracing (a big proponent of competitor Nvidia’s RTX line) without the need for some proprietary technology and this feature is confirmed to be supported by the PS5.
- High-speed SSD, capacity is yet to be confirmed. Great for both OS processing and loading for games, can also aid with texture pop in. When a game calls for the rendering of details, it does it within a certain distance and if the drive is too slow the information needed for rendering those details will come in when it’s too late and causes textures to pop into view. This won’t alleviate this issue completely but we may see fewer instances of it as a result. They also claim that the SSD is faster than anything available for PCs which seems a bit much given how ludicrously fast and overkill M.2 and NVMe SSDs can be.
- Custom AMD unit for 3D audio
- A disc drive of some form
In addition to all this Sony have also confirmed that their next-gen console will not launch this year. Given Sony’s current stance on VR (wholeheartedly supporting it with their very successful PSVR platform), it would be safe to assume they are still focusing on VR. It seems that they are supporting both a new iteration of PSVR as well as the original iteration. With this also comes the news that the PS5 will have backwards compatibility with PS4 games (something which was to be expected with how modular and simple AMD’s architectures are). The next PlayStation will also technically support 8K but I wouldn’t really expect games to take advantage of this given the power requirements for 4K let alone 8K (PCs can still struggle with decent 4K performance without breaking the bank).
If you’re hanging on for a release date, you will have to keep on waiting as Sony seemed unwilling to comment any further outside of it not coming this year. However, given that it is featuring Navi it would be fair to speculate a 2020 release window, perhaps to coincide with the consumer release for the GPU architecture.
Sourced from Wired
Jordan lives and breathes Dark Souls, even though his favourite game is Bloodborne. He takes pride in bashing his face on walls and praising the sun. Hailing from the land of tacos, he is the token minority for WellPlayed.
