- 14 May 2003
- Tranmere Rovers
It begins, folks. (Thanks, @PRO_TOO!)
EXCLUSIVE: WHAT TO EXPECT FROM SONY'S NEXT-GEN PLAYSTATION
EXCLUSIVE: WHAT TO EXPECT FROM SONY'S NEXT-GEN PLAYSTATION
Sony and Microsoft both extended the current console generation via a mid-cycle refresh, with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4spawning mini-sequels (the Xbox One S and PS4 Pro). “The key question,” Cerny says, “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.”
The answer, in this case, is the latter. It’s why we’re sitting here, secreted away in a conference room at Sony’s headquarters in Foster City, California, where Cerny is finally detailing the inner workings of the as-yet-unnamed console that will replace the PS4.
The answer, in this case, is the latter.
The CPU is based on the third generation of AMD’s Ryzen line and contains eight cores of the company’s new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. The GPU, a custom variant of Radeon’s Navi family, will support ray tracing, a technique that models the travel of light to simulate complex interactions in 3D environments.
The AMD chip also includes a custom unit for 3D audio that Cerny thinks will redefine what sound can do in a videogame.
To demonstrate, Cerny fires up a PS4 Pro playing Spider-Man, a 2018 PS4 exclusive that he worked on alongside Insomniac Games. (He’s not just an systems architect; Cerny created arcade classic Marble Madness when he was all of 19 and was heavily involved with PlayStation and PS2 franchises like Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, and Ratchet and Clank.) On the TV, Spidey stands in a small plaza. Cerny presses a button on the controller, initiating a fast-travel interstitial screen. When Spidey reappears in a totally different spot in Manhattan, 15 seconds have elapsed. Then Cerny does the same thing on a next-gen devkit connected to a different TV. (The devkit, an early “low-speed” version, is concealed in a big silver tower, with no visible componentry.) What took 15 seconds now takes less than one: 0.8 seconds, to be exact.
That’s just one consequence of an SSD.
At the moment, Sony won’t cop to exact details about the SSD—who makes it, whether it utilizes the new PCIe 4.0 standard—but Cerny claims that it has a raw bandwidth higher than any SSD available for PCs.
(While the next-gen console will support 8K graphics, TVs that deliver it are few and far between, so we’re using a 4K TV.)
https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-sony-next-gen-console/As you’ve noticed, this is all hardware talk. Cerny isn’t ready to chat about services or other features, let alone games and price, and neither is anyone at Sony. Nor will you hear much about the console at E3 in June—for the first time, Sony won’t be holding a keynote at the annual games show.