With the current generation of consoles winding down, and with Microsoft having revealed some information on their upcoming console code-named “Project Scarlett”, it’s Sony’s turn to reveal just what we’re to expect from the PlayStation 5. Not much has been revealed about the console, however.
Lucky for us, Wired was able to sit down with Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan to glean a few more details about the console, which will indeed be called the PlayStation 5.
The PS5 is tentatively scheduled for release in 2020 for the holiday season. Like the Scarlett, the PS5 will have a CPU based on AMD’s Ryzen line, and a GPU based on its Navi family. It will also have a solid-state drive in lieu of a regular hard drive. The console will also support raytracing, something that Nvidia has been touting with its line of RTX cards.
This time around, however, game installation will be different. “Rather than treating games like a big block of data,” Cerny says, “we’re allowing finer-grained access to the data.” That could mean the ability to install just a game’s multiplayer campaign, leaving the single-player campaign for another time, or just installing the whole thing and then deleting the single-player campaign once you’ve finished it.
Furthermore, the UI for the PS5 will see an expected revamp. Instead of having to launch the game to see what single-player missions you could do or what multiplayer matches you can join, “Multiplayer game servers will provide the console with the set of joinable activities in real time. Single-player games will provide information like what missions you could do and what rewards you might receive for completing them—and all of those choices will be visible in the UI. As a player you just jump right into whatever you like.”
Then there’s the controller. The DualShock 5 (though that’s not its official name) appears to carry on with what we got in the DualShock 4, but with some tweaks. Namely, the possibility of a voice-driven AI assistant, an evolution of force feedback with “adaptive triggers” that offer varying resistance levels, and improved haptic feedback.
There’s obviously lots more in the article, so check it out from the link above. Sadly, we still don’t know what it looks like, but rest assured, it’s not going to be as bizarre as images of the developer kits (like the one above) that have been floating around.
Time to save your pennies.
PlayStation 5 launches holiday 2020: https://t.co/VuaxUVoBaR #PS5 pic.twitter.com/MPkKyRaHio
— PlayStation (@PlayStation) October 8, 2019