Sony still hasn’t revealed what the PlayStation 5 looks like but they have talked a lot about its tech specs and the magic of its SSD.
To be fair to Sony they already said that this week’s PlayStation 5 livestream would be a deep dive into the tech side of things, but we don’t think anyone was prepared for anything quite as dry as the ‘Road to PS5’ presentation below.
Although it wasn’t made clear beforehand it was basically Sony’s previously planned GDC (Game Developers Conference) presentation, which had to be cancelled due to the coronavirus.
That means it was originally intended only for developers and so there was no look at any games or the console itself. Nor was there any hint at a price or release date, just a lot of very detailed descriptions of how the PlayStation 5’s innards work.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg%3Fversion%3D3%26rel%3D1%26fs%3D1%26autohide%3D2%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26wmode%3Dtransparent
To judge by the comments, it seems most viewers were bored to tears within the first few minutes, if they weren’t creeped out by the obviously fake CGI audience.
But there was a lot of important stuff revealed, with the impossibly soft spoken Mark Cerny (he really should start a side career in ASMR videos) implying that the SSD is going to be the console’s biggest game-changer, allowing games to load in just one second and putting an end to update patch installs.
That’s all very good (really, it’s a great thing) but it’s not a very interesting thing to hear about, especially without any visual examples. Not only that, but the Xbox Series X also has an SSD, although Sony are implying theirs will be faster.
To save you the bother of searching through it there wasn’t a single screenshot or video of anything specifically to do with the PlayStation 5. The closest you got was a 2D map of Jak 2 and a screenshot of Dead Space, which Cerny described as ‘old school’.
PS5 tech specs
CPU: 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz (variable frequency)
GPU: 10.28 TFLOPs, 36 CUs at 2.23GHz (variable frequency)
GPU Architecture: Custom RDNA 2
Memory/Interface: 16GB GDDR6/256-bit
Memory Bandwidth: 448GB/s
Internal Storage: Custom 825GB SSD
IO Throughput: 5.5GB/s (raw), typical 8-9GB/s (compressed)
Expandable Storage: NVMe SSD slot
External Storage: USB HDD support
Optical Drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray Drive
What you did get though, was a promise that the top 100 PlayStation 4 games should be backwards compatible from launch, which will please many.
It also seems that new audio technology Tempest 3D AudioTech is perhaps the secret feature of the PlayStation 5 that was being hinted about previously.
Again, it’ll undoubtedly be a major positive but it’s a difficult thing to get excited about without any kind of demonstration or example.
People that like arguing over numbers over the Internet will no doubt find more of interest in the tech specs below, although others will probably be more relieved at the promise that the PlayStation 5 will be quieter than the PlayStation 4.
It’s good that Sony are finally talking about the PlayStation 5 in public, but ironically this particular presentation is probably one they should’ve kept just for developers.
As it stands, we still don’t know anything new about the PlayStation 5’s games or controller, and still have no idea when we’ll find out either.
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