The future of mean machines
With game consoles being at the end of their lifecycle, a new generation of gaming machines are on the horizon, writes Aiman Maulana
WITH Sony Interactive Entertainment pulling out of E3 2019, it has been speculated that the PlayStation 5 still has a long way to go and there’s nothing noteworthy to showcase.
This makes sense. If they have nothing interesting to show, it’s best to focus their efforts elsewhere.
In a surprising move, however, Sony has revealed a number of major details on the next generation PlayStation console.
For starters, the PlayStation 5 will be powered by a customised AMD Ryzen processor based on the 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture, and a custom AMD Radeon Navi graphics processing unit.
According to Sony PlayStation lead architect Mark Cerny, the hardware is powerful enough to support ray tracing, a technique that models the travel of light to similar complex interactions in a 3D space.
It is also expected to support up to 8K resolution (7680 x 4320) graphics, and should be able to play all games on at least 4K 60 FPS.
The next-generation PlayStation console will also address the biggest bottleneck which held the PlayStation 4 back, the storage device.
It will be utilising a custom Solid State Drive which is capable of loading Marvel’s Spider-Man in just one second. In comparison, the PS4 Pro with a regular Hard Drive storage takes roughly 15 seconds to load the game.
Other notable features include full backwards compatibility with PS4 games, as well as support for the existing PlayStation VR headset.
This means that if you already own the PS4, you don’t have to get rid of your games and the VR headset. You can simply reuse them on the new console without any issues.
According to the Sony financial reports for the 2018 fiscal year (which was published in April this year, it appears that they don’t have plans to release it anytime soon.
One thing’s for sure, it will be a major upgrade over the existing console and it will be a very powerful gaming machine.