50 Reasons To Be Excited About PS5

Around 12 months from now you’ll be booting-up your fifth-generation PlayStation, but what can you expect it to do? We’ve rounded up the latest details, speculated on what’s to come, and quizzed some of the industry’s devs on what they expect. It’s time to get excited, because PlayStation 5 is almost here…

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01 IT ’S PLAYSTATION 5!

“I’m proud to share that our next-generation console will be called PlayStation 5,” said Jim Ryan, president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment. He added in a Wired article: “It’s nice to be able to say it, like a giant burden has been lifted from my shoulders.” Before now we had to call it ‘Sony’s next console’ just in case Sony lost its collective marketing mind and called the system PS-Next or PlayStation Ultra – but, of course, it was always going to be PlayStation 5.

02 INCREDIBLE DETAIL

The solid state drive’s loading approach (see p6) means we’ll get more detailed worlds. An SSD treats data differently to a traditional HDD, where devs need to duplicate data to make it more ‘searchable’. On an SSD devs needn’t duplicate assets – trees, lampposts, and the like – so there’s extra space. That room should lead to more detailed worlds, particularly with a new CPU powering everything.

03 NEW CPU

PS5 will be powered by an AMD Ryzen custom chip, a Zen2, with eight cores / 16 threads. “Generating a whole world and hundreds of levels requires all the horsepower we can get,” says Joris Dormans, game director of upcoming procedural beauty Unexplored 2: The Wayfarer’s Legacy. “A faster CPU and faster memory will dramatically decrease generation times, enabling us to procedurally generate even more complex worlds and gameplay.”

04 NEW DISCS

Not only will PS5’s games come on 100GB discs, inserted into an optical drive, the drive will play 4K Blu-ray.

05 IT ’S OUT WINTER 2020