While we’re still a little way off from an official PlayStation 5 reveal, details on Sony’s next generation console are starting to trickle down to us, and I have to say I like what I’m seeing.
Sony’s Mark Cerny, who worked on the PS4 and Vita as lead architect, gave an exclusive interview to Wired last month in which he confirmed a handful of specs and details for the PlayStation 5, including ray tracing for more immersive audios and visual, and a solid-state drive (SSD) that helps drastically reduce loading times.
More recently, Sony held a meeting in Japan in which is showed off some of the new console’s capabilities, specifically highlighting the PlayStation 5’s loading times compared to the PlayStation 4.
While the hardware was never actually referred to as the PlayStation 5 in the presentation (it was simply referred to as next generation hardware), I’ll be calling it the PS5 for now, for the sake of ease.
The Wall Street Journal’s Takashi Mochizuki attended the meeting and was good enough to capture some footage, which he then shared to Twitter. The footage in question showed off a scene from Marvel’s Spider-Man running on a PS4 Pro and current PS5 hardware, comparing how quickly the scene loaded on each piece of hardware.
The loading times shown in the demonstration were pretty much identical to the example Cerny gave to Wired, with the PS4 Pro loading up the scene in just over eight seconds, while the PS5 had it up and running in less than one.
Check it out for yourself below.
Also during the presentation, Sony clarified what had been confirmed for the console and what has yet to be officially discussed. We know then, that the PS5 will boast a solid-state drive, ray tracing, 8K, all new CPU and GPU, 3D audio, disc support, and backwards compatibility.
Mochizuki also reported that Sony used the phrase “anytime, anywhere, without disconnections” when discussing the PlayStation’s seamless remote play feature. It’s unclear exactly what this means, but it could have something to do with the recently announced cloud gaming partnership between Sony and Microsoft.
Sony also clarified that we’ve yet to receive official word on a release date, price, or what games we can expect to arrive on the console when it does launch – though the company stopped short of explaining when we can expect to learn about these details.
Just yesterday, industry analyst Hideki Yasuda posited that the PS5 would launch in November 2020 with a price tag of around £390, though this is purely speculation.
A recent report from Kotaku on the 2020 edition of Call of Duty also found that staff at Treyarch believe their next COD will launch on current and next gen consoles, implying a 2020 launch for the PS5 is likely.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.