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Sony Officially Announces The PlayStation 5
And it will play your PS4 games!
We all know that the PlayStation 5 is coming, but Sony has just made it official by confirming that the console is on its way – and it has also offered up some additional details on the system.
In an interview with Wired, the console’s chief architect Mark Cerny – who also worked on the PS4 and PS Vita, and is something of an industry legend – explained what will make Sony’s next games console so special.
First up is the fact that the console will be backwards compatible with all of your existing PS4 games, which is a nice touch. It’s nothing new – Sony’s systems have been sporting this feature, on and off, since the days of the PS2 – but it will at least make that upgrade decision that little easier to stomach.
The other big news is that the machine will opt for a solid state hard drive which will drastically reduce loading times. This will allow developers to all but remove the pauses in-between levels which plague so many modern games these days.
CPU and GPU enhancements are obviously on the way; the PS5 will sport a third-gen AMD Ryzen with eight cores, as well as a custom Radeon Navi. It is also hinted that the console will support ray-tracing, a new graphical feature which is only just hitting top-of-the-line PCs at the moment. However, details are thin on the ground about exactly how Sony will achieve this, as ray-tracing is incredible processor-intensive.
8K support and 3D audio are also mentioned, and PlayStation VR will be compatible with the console. Cerny also revealed that the PS5 will use physical media, although given the fact that Microsoft is about to launch a drive-less Xbox One, it could be the final Sony console to use optical media for game delivery.
The bad news? We won’t be getting the system this year. PS5 (or, as Cerny calls it, ‘Next Gen Console’) won’t be arriving until some time next year. There’s more bad news in that Sony is skipping E3 this year, and Cerny tells Wired that PS5 news will be thin on the ground at the event.