In a (rather dry) video hosted by Mark Cerny, Lead System Architect on PlayStation 5, Sony has released the official technical specifications for their upcoming console, which is slated for release later this year.
The video, hosted in front of a simulated studio audience due to the COVID-19 outbreak, saw Cerney showing off three goals for the console:
- Listening to Developers
- Balancing Evolution and Revolution
- Finding New Dreams
These things worked out to mean that the PlayStation 5 is getting an SSD in every unit, that while ray tracing and other next-gen features are supported, they are not required for developers to use, and that the team is putting immense work into three dimensional audio unlike anything else we’ve seen.
The specific hardware specifications are not dissimilar to that of Microsoft’s Xbox Series X, with 8-core Navi 2 CPUs, 10.28 TFLOPS (compared to Xbox’s 12 TFLOPS), and roughly the same memory bandwidth. The PlayStation 5 will come with an 825GB SSD standard, with the ability to expand the console with industry-standard M.2 SSDs.
Much of the talk was about extremely detail technical specifications, which is what we would expect given that this was a talk slated for the Game Developer’s Conference that was cancelled in light of recent events. However, it was also made it clear that much of the work is going to take place over the next few years, including some of the fancier audio features that are coming to the console.
We will wait and see if the release date for PlayStation 5 is indeed pushed back or if Sony has other plans to release the console in stages with major software update down the line for support such as higher end audio.
Unfortunately, no hardware or gameplay was shown off, but again, given the nature of this discussion, we didn’t expect to see much beyond an actual deep dive into the specifications, which is what Sony delivered pointedly on.
As more information is released about the PlayStation 5 and its development, we will be here to share it with you.