The 8 most important details we already know about PlayStation 5, Sony’s next-generation video game console

“Death Stranding” is an upcoming PlayStation 4 game starring Norman Reedus. It will be playable on the PlayStation 5 thanks to backwards capability Kojima Productions

The PlayStation 5, Sony’s next generation console that’s deep in production, will arrive during the 2020 holiday season.

The first details about the PS5, however, were actually revealed in an interview with Wired in April.

As expected, the PlayStation 5 is promised to be more powerful than the existing PlayStation 4— but we’ve slowly been learning more about the next-gen console’s new features.

Who’s ready for the PlayStation 5?

After months of speculation, Sony finally confirmed the name of the PlayStation 5 in a blog post on Tuesday and set a release window for the 2020 holiday season. The company first detailed the successor to the PlayStation 4 in an interview with Wired in April, where it discussed the specific chips and hardware powering the console without revealing its name.

Though the console is still more than a year away, more details about the PlayStation 5 have emerged slowly but surely.

Here are all the most important things we know about the PlayStation 5 so far:

1. It will have much nicer graphics.

Unlike the PlayStation 4 Pro and the Xbox One X — half-step consoles that offered more power in the same console generation — the PlayStation 5 “allows for fundamental changes in what a game can be,” Mark Cerny, Sony’s lead system architect, told Wired.

Core to that mission is the new console’s processing chips: a new central processing unit and a graphics processing unit from AMD. The former is based on AMD’s Ryzen line, while the latter is part of Radeon’s Navi GPU line.

What that means for you: The PlayStation 5 is built on chips that are yet-to-be-released.

2. It will have much faster — or almost non-existent — load times.

When you think of flashy new video game consoles, you probably don’t think too much about hard drives — the thing you store games and game saves on. 

But Cerny told Wired that the next PlayStation’s hard drive is “a true game changer.” Why’s that? Because, for the first time ever, the next PlayStation will come with a solid state drive. 

What’s different about that? It’s much, much faster than a traditional hard disc drive. In a demonstration of the new drive, 2018’s “Marvel’s Spider-Man” was loaded up on an early development kit for the next PlayStation — it demonstrated a reduction in load times from 15 seconds to less than a single second.

That indeed could be a game-changer. Just imagine all the time you’ve wasted waiting for games to load — now, imagine that being erased permanently.

3. It’s capable of producing 8K visuals.

8K? Yes, 8K — as in “the next step for television resolutions after 4K.” And yes, you probably just got a 4K television. (Even more likely: You still don’t have a 4K television!)

That’s fine. Though the PlayStation 5 will apparently be capable of producing 8K visuals, we don’t expect that any games will take advantage of that for some time. After all, there are barely any 8K sets available for sale, let alone a large audience of people waiting for 8K content. And that doesn’t even get into the absurd price tags on the 8K TVs that do exist.

This capability seems more like a measure of future-proofing against what will come next rather than a new standard for visual fidelity.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/playstation-5-release-date-price-specs-features-2019-4