I won’t hide it, I’m a Playstation fan. I have fond memories of playing Syphon Filter and Tekken 3 on my Dad’s original Playstation as a kid. My brother and I put countless hours in the PS2 classic War of the Monsters trying to unlock any and everything in that game. LittleBigPlanet and Demon’s Souls on PS3 both opened my eyes to new types of games and helped shaped my tastes going forward. Bloodborne…need I say more? I even loved my PSP (which introduced me to Monster Hunter) and P.S. Vita (R.I.P. ), even if the latter was gone too soon.
Even with a lot of strange (and frankly often anti-consumer seeming) missteps, cough Vita memory cards, “Other OS removal”, stubbornness around Cross-play cough, I nonetheless find myself coming back to the familiarity and comfort of Playstation, and I’m always anxious and excited about what Sony’s planning to do next.
Of course, the biggest “next” for the time being is the next generation. I’ve been placing my bets that we’d probably be getting an official next gen announcement/reveal in the next couple months, but until then, all we have for now are speculation, rumors, and leaks.
So with that unnecessarily long intro, I’m basically making this thread to serve as a place to share and discuss news and information about the inevitable PS5.
First up, a WIRED interwiew with lead system architect Mark Cerny about the hardware.
A couple of things that stood out to me are:
Physical media
Playstation 4 backwards compatibility
PSVR compatibility
A solid state drive for memory
That last part with the SSD may not sound like too much of a big deal, but I encourage everyone to read the passage that further discusses it. Just one excerpt:
“To demonstrate, Cerny fires up a PS4 Pro playing Spider-Man , a 2018 PS4 exclusive that he worked on alongside Insomniac Games…On the TV, Spidey stands in a small plaza. Cerny presses a button on the controller, initiating a fast-travel interstitial screen. When Spidey reappears in a totally different spot in Manhattan, 15 seconds have elapsed. Then Cerny does the same thing on a next-gen devkit connected to a different TV…What took 15 seconds now takes less than one: 0.8 seconds, to be exact.”
That’s a very straightforward example, but I can easily see how something like that could change how games are even designed.
My biggest source of excitement is the new CPU. 8 next-gen Ryzen cores is potentially a dramatic upgrade from what’s been the standard these past two generations, despite keeping the same number of cores. With luck, it should allow for hugely increased complexity in terms of systems simulation, which is something that has stagnated since the time of the PS3 and Xbox 360.
I was about to link to the WIRED article as it seems like it’s one of the few reports we have on it so far, but it reads very much like a self-inflating promotional press release, talking about the new console as “something that’s much more revolution than evolution.” and boasting that it’s this huge step when it’s probably not going to be that dramatic.
Looking past this language though I’m certainly interested in more power from the console, the current gen consoles were historically underpowered even when they came out, and base level versions of them struggle with today’s games. And with backwards compatibility in the picture I wonder if they can optimise PS4 favourites to, let’s say, get a stable 60fps, or reduce loading with an SSD (looking at you, 30fps locked Bloodborne).
Besides that I am hoping for an even deeper backwards compatibility library, can they finally emulate the cell processing of the Ps3 and make those games available on the system? What about Ps2 games outside of a streaming service? Will they ever bother bringing back PSX game emulation?
I’m less excited about graphical fidelity and the prospect for ray-tracing as I am for a console that can run it’s own games with stability. You gotta walk before you can sprint.
PS4 backwards compatibility is the best news. I hope it can mean more games hit a stable 30, the ones that struggled, but that stuff is probably never just related to raw power, so we’ll see.
And the thing with faster loading, that’s cool, but if they are showing it with a PS4 game (with assets and everything optimized to run on a PS4 (which is old)) that doesn’t mean that loading times will be faster on a PS5 game. But if it’s good for backwards stuff, again, I’m good.
Aiming for 8k just seems ridiculous. Ray-tracing also seems way too soon to be in a console, but what do I know.
Aiming for 8k is silly because like a lot of people don’t have 4k TVs i feel like? I mean i know 4k tvs aren’t like super duper expensive anymore, but still, they are still on that “once a year splurge” tier of expensive that I feel a lot of people can’t get in addition to a PS5.
Honestly, the price point is still the biggest thing imo. I’ve heard 500 dollars being tossed around, which seems fairly reasonable, but unlike when i bought my ps4 and I was living food/rent free with my parents haha, its probably going to be a one to two year plan to purchase one. (of course there is also a question about if i’m going to put down 500 why am i not just putting in a few more hundred and getting a PC).
Who knows really. At least unlike the end of the PS3/360 era, i still feel like i have tons of games i still want to play on my PS4, so even i probably do wait for price cuts, i should still have lots of stuff to play.
I just need this out before the fan in my PS4 dies. It’s sounding worse and worse all the time. During DMC5 I thought it might achieve liftoff and fly into space to explore new galaxies.
Excited for this new wave of consoles to come out so that I can start ignoring mainstream releases I can’t play for a couple years and spend a lot of time with retro/indie games.
I’m a little bit cynical about the announcement of backwards compatibility in that I wonder how many games will be playable at launch and if they plan to have the entire PS4 catalogue playable both digitally and physically.
Obviously any backwards compatibility is better than what we have now, but given Sony’s history I wouldn’t be surprised if this feature comes with some shenanigans.
Both PS2 and PS3 had backwards compatibility without any shenanigans. They even went so far on the PS3 to include one extra chip just to make it happen. It will work out of the box, I’m 100% certain. I’d be very surprised if the digital library doesn’t carry over as well.
I guess what I’m saying is I don’t expect there to be any logistical issues, I’m just preparing myself to not be surprised if this launches similarly to how XBONE’s backwards compatibility did, with a handful of games meant to be expanded over time, for no reason other than to extend the novelty or funnel people to launch releases, etc.
It’s admittedly a HYPER cynical take, but if you take things like cross-play as an example Sony doesn’t always do what makes the most sense.
If the PS5 can deliver a steady frame rate, zero loading time Bloodborne, that would basically be the only thing that would get me to get a PS5 ASAP instead of in a few years. I don’t think that will happen but it will be interesting to see if any of Sony’s first party games are updated in any way to take that into account. Or like if PS4 games will run as if they’re on a PS4 Pro by default or how that will work.
This too, I’m not sure how smart or not it is to do this. I mean with this in mind, I assume the optical drive will be able to play Ultra HD disks instead of just DVDs and blu-rays? There’s no way that will impact the success of the PS5 on the level of the PS2 also being a DVD player back when it dropped. And like you say even 4K is barely a thing to most people. But I don’t know Sony’s stake in the new formats today, like if they can include it without making the PS5 much more expensive why not? I wouldn’t miss it at all though.
Same here, ideally of course you just, like, log in, set the PS5 as your primary system, and then download all your stuff or plug whatever USB hard drive you were using on your PS4 into the PS5. This was a surprising announcement from Sony after all the times they had commented on how backwards compatibility wasn’t really a thing folks used often despite the vocal demand for it. So I’m hoping it’s relatively no-nonsense like it was for the launch PS3 models. Same for the PlayStation Store, I mean the way the PSN works now where you can look up/see listings or games across platforms makes me hopeful.
Speaking of hard drive space, I’m assuming this is where they’ll cheap out again like with the PS4, PS3, Vita, and PSP. You’d think if a thing only exists to let you purchase more stuff and be more tied to their platform they’d want you to get as much of it as possible, but I have a feeling we’ll all be hooking up USB drives to our PS5’s just about two years from now.
Backwards compatibility, better load times, 60 frames, and a UI that doesn’t suck are pretty much all I want out of a next generation of consoles.
Bit worried in Sony’s case about the games, though. PlayStation’s main draw for me over the years since like the PS1 has been weird niche anime bullshit. Any multi-platform releases or big western exclusives that I’ve played on their platform have been enjoyable but largely coincidental and not the reason that I own the hardware. Sony hasn’t seemed as welcoming of a platform for those games lately, and just in general Japanese developers have started to get out there more on Steam and the Switch (the latter of which will probably continue, since most of those games don’t need 8k ray tracing capabilities.)
So, I dunno. Japan has always been Sony’s sort of secondary “exclusive” lineup, but I don’t think they’ll have that anymore, and I don’t think their first-party stuff alone is enough to sell me right now–especially for something that sounds like it’ll probably launch at $600 Canadian. I can see myself spending that money on PC parts this time around.
The 8K bullet point is probably a case of, it’ll have the tech available to output at an 8K image when the TV displays for it exist, but most native render targets will hover between 1800p and 4K. It could possibly support an 8K upscale via checkerboarding, but I doubt we’ll see anything approaching that until at least 3 years into the cycle.
It’s a pretty generic “we’ve future-proofed our new device” statement, I wouldn’t expect it to mean anything anytime soon.
man, the stuff in that article about super fast ssd loading seems uh, really disingenuous to me. faster disk access does hypothetically mean that next gen games are going to load faster, but what’s actually going to happen is that all the textures will get bigger because now they can shift more data in the same amount of time.
I don’t think you should expect any sweeping changes to load times or framerates in next gen games because devs have already chosen the framerates and load times of the current gen games as an acceptable tradeoff for overall graphics quality, so I think it’s pretty likely that all that happens is that next gen graphics get upgraded until games are hitting those same targets and nothing really changes
Any who has played PC games on HDD and SSD, load times are dramatically faster on SSD. In a console you have all your hardware functions in a single block so all functions like storage, GPU, CPU, RAM and even network connectivity have simplified routing now so if properly leveraged (Something Cerny is very able to figure out) the bandwidth and efficiency can be super high. Throw in the read/write speed of SSD compared to the PS4’s stock HDD it’s likely capable of getting the game’s data and textures into the consoles RAM in microseconds.
The resolution and size of the textures will be contingent on the frame-rate and resolution the CPU and GPU can handle, not the amount of concurrent operations the storage can spit out.
I’m most interested to see how Sony handles VR when it comes to the PS5. Making the system backwards compatible with the current headset seems essential, but I would really hope to also see a new headset with internal tracking and a replacement for the Move controllers that both don’t require the camera and are a little more designed around the needs of VR.
) and P.S. Vita (R.I.P. 
), even if the latter was gone too soon.
You’d think if a thing only exists to let you purchase more stuff and be more tied to their platform they’d want you to get as much of it as possible, but I have a feeling we’ll all be hooking up USB drives to our PS5’s just about two years from now.
