Recently Mark Cerny, lead architect, and producer of Sony’s PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita sat down with the guys over at WIRED to talk about Sony’s upcoming next-gen console. Whilst we won’t see it for a while longer the upgrades he talks about are seriously astounding and should have not just PlayStation fans but all gamers excited for the future.
Thanks to the PS4 Pro and Xbox One S this generations cycle has been extended considerably and its set to continue as Sony’s next-gen system won’t be arriving in 2019. When talking with WIRED about the future of Sony’s upcoming console Mark Cerny stated: “The key question, is whether the console adds another layer to the sorts of experiences you already have access to, or if it allows for fundamental changes in what a game can be.” It appears he’s focusing on the latter.
Cerny, similar to the PS4 will be the consoles lead architect and it will have some pretty beefy upgrades from its predecessor. Mainly coming in the form of a more powerful CPU and GPU. This will make previously unreachable graphics a reality and will increase system memory in both size and speed.
Warning technical jargon ahead
It has an AMD chip at its core, more specifically the third generation of AMD’s Ryzen line which contains eight cores of the company’s new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. As for the GPU, it’s a custom variant of Radeon’s Navi family and will support a technique called “ray tracing”. It models the travel of light to replicate extremely complex interactions between light and objects in 3D environments and has been a staple of Hollywood visual effects for years. It is beginning to worm its way into high-end processors, (which are anywhere up to $10,000) but it is unheard of in game consoles. Until now. Ray tracing’s immediate benefits are largely visual. They way it mimics light bouncing from object to object in a scene as well as reflective surfaces and refractions through glass or liquid means it can achieve a level of realism which simply isn’t available on consoles. Not yet anyway.
Cerny stated when asked by possible audio improvements coming with the next console; “As a gamer, it’s been a little bit of a frustration that audio did not change too much between PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. With the next console, the dream is to show how dramatically different the audio experience can be when we apply significant amounts of hardware horsepower to it.” This will make players feel more immersed than ever and whilst it will not require external hardware it is best experienced through headphones. Obviously.
So whilst all that talk of graphics upgrades and audio improvements is all well and good, a huge talking point about the new console and one of the PS4 Pro’s best features is increased storage. The question on everyone’s lips is…are SSD’s an option?
Both PlayStation and Xbox offer external SSD’s for better load times but including one in the console is tricky because their so different. Cerny himself told WIRED “I have an SSD in my laptop, and when I want to change from Excel to Word I can wait 15 seconds.”. Sony’s next-gen console is hoping to be more specialized.
This point was proved in a demonstration by Cerny who booted up Marvels Spider-Man on a PS4 Pro and fast traveled across the map. The load time took 15 seconds. He then did the exact same thing on another TV using a dev-kit, (an early low-speed version of the next-gen console). That which took 15 seconds on the PS4 Pro was completed in exactly 0.8 seconds on the early dev-kit. Extremely impressive. As well as impressive loading speeds an SSD can also increase the speed at which a world could be rendered. The next-gen console will also support 8K graphics although many TV’s only support 4K.
The future of gaming is extremely interesting. We have the Google Stadia launching this year, Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox will most likely have cloud gaming, and Sony’s recent announcements for the currently unnamed next-gen PlayStation all sound extremely cool.
It will still be a while until we actually get to see this new console but until then we can sit back and embrace PlayStation in its fourth generation whilst dreaming about what the fifth could bring.
