The PS5 is set to be an incredible piece of kit. For starters, it's said to be sporting a solid state drive claimed by Epic Games' Tim Sweeney to be better than gaming PCs. Its state-of-the-art memory bank is set to eliminate fast travel delays and loading times, while a new Geometry Engine and Inter-section Engine will helpt to create incredible graphics with up to 10.4 Teraflops of power.
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No, we've got more confirmation of what Sony's machine can do. In the past, we've seen the PS4's Spider-Man game load up to eighteen times faster on the new console. However, new information from the Sony corporate strategy meeting, which took place on May 19, has revealed more about the PS5's capabilities. Sony president and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida led the meeting, and a shortened PDF of his remarks were released by Sony.
Regarding the PS5's massive SSD, the document says the following:
"In order to further enhance the sense of immersion in games, we expect to improve not just the resolution, but the speed of games. Through a custom‐designed high‐speed SSD, we plan to realize game data processing speeds that are approximately 100 times faster than PS4."
Mark Cerny (pictured) revealed the PS5's secrets in a tech-heavy presentation back in March
That's a huge claim. The document goes on to say this is used to make travelling through worlds immersive, which we already knew: in a tech-heavy presentation mostly geared towards developers, lead system architect Mark Cerny claimed these incredible speeds would be used to load the next sections of game worlds in a flash, eliminating the need for designers to place "corridors" in their worlds to disguise loading the next section.
This is a great example of technology not just about doing the same thing, but faster and with better graphics. The increased loading speeds will affect how we game, creative immersive, interactive environments and opening up new ways to play.
Vast open-world games like The Elder Scrolls are set to become the norm
The PS5 is emphasising all this to bring itself to bear against the Xbox Series X, which is promising similar leaps in memory with features such as its Quick Resume feature, which will allow the player to jump between multiple different games like Netflix shows, rather than logging out of one before booting up another.
While the Xbox Series X has dominated the conversation for the first part of the year with a series of well-planned reveals, it fell afoul of gamers last month by releasing a series of third-party gameplay trailers with... very little actual gameplay in them at all, just glorified cinematics.
PS5 has consolidated by preparing its own slate of games for a June 4 reveal. Meanwhile, Epic Games has released a preview of its Unreal Engine 5, which is coming to both consoles. The demo was recorded running live on a PS5, and the results look stunning: we can definitely believe the PS5 is running 100x faster than the PS4.
The Unreal Engine 5 demo looked, well, unreal.
Will the Xbox Series X look as good in practice? We're not sure, but after Microsoft bagged an early lead, the console wars are certainly heating up.
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