Though rumours have been swirling for months, it’s now official: The PlayStation 5 is coming and we now know that it’s got some beefy specs. But in classic Sony fashion, we’re going to have to sit through tedious and unnecessarily long teases before this next-gen console is anywhere close to hitting shelves.
Remember when Sony announced the PS4 back in 2013? Two hours of hype, lofty marketing speak, and then the console itself was a no-show.
This time around we have slightly more details, thanks to an interview Sony’s Mark Cerny gave Wired. The quick and dirty of it is as follows: new CPU, GPU, a solid state drive (!), 3D audio, and backward compatibility with PS4 games. Of those specs, the most intriguing is the SSD as it promises noticeably faster loading and rendering times to keep up with more graphically intense games. According to Cerny, the CPU will be based on AMD’s third-generation Ryzen line, while the GPU will be a custom variant of Radeon’s Navi family—and yes, it supports ray tracing.
Wired didn’t get much in the way of a hands-on but a demonstration of a section of Spider-Man on a PS4 Pro showed the character travelling between destinations in its fictitious Manhattan setting. The load time was around 15 seconds to relocate Spidey. The same section of the game running on the next-gen console only took 0.08 seconds to load.
As for the rest of it, Sony is being purposefully annoying. When asked whether the next-gen console will keep with tradition and be called the PlayStation 5, Cerny reportedly gave an “enigmatic smile” and only referred to it as the “next-gen console.” (It would be very Sony-like to call it PSV just to spite all of us.) As for price, ha. Who knows. It’s also not hitting stores anytime in 2019. We could see it in 2020. Or, possibly sometime in 2021. Also, don’t expect more details at this year’s E3. For the first time in 24 years, Sony has opted to skip the event entirely.
So buckle in folks and prepare for at least another year—possibly two—of Sony coyly dropping hints and rumours about a product that is definitely coming, just not yet.
[Wired]