One question in the mind of many console gamers during the last couple of months has been when Sony would release a new console, and what the specs of the new console would be.
Thankfully, Sony’s lead architect Mark Cerny spilled the beans last month when he revealed what to expect from Sony’s next-gen console, a console which many pundits are now referring to as the PS5 or PlayStation 5 (Sony is yet to announce a name for its upcoming machine).
And one of the features that caught many people’s eyes is the fact that the PS5 will be shipping with an SSD drive as standard. These drives have been steadily replacing traditional hard drives in consumer PCs for a while, and the truth is that they offer a marked improvement in performance.
Sony’s Mark Cerny himself was quick to highlight how much the PS5’s SSD drive can improve gamer’s experiences, by pointing out how the PS5 could load a level in last year’s Marvel’s Spider-Man game in less than a second, while the PS4 Pro took more than 8 seconds to load the same level.
And a leaked video shows the PS5’s (or a prototype of it at least) super-fast loading of a Spider-Man level, with the PS4 Pro lagging behind quite a bit, as was recently covered in Forbes.
This video was part of an investor presentation, and was tweeted by Wall Street Journal reporter Takashi Mochizuki.
Sony’s official video comparing performance of PS4 Pro vs next-gen PlayStation pic.twitter.com/2eUROxKFLq
— Takashi Mochizuki (@mochi_wsj) 21 May 2019
This makes it seem like Sony’s ads for the PS5 might highlight the fact that their new console is capable of delivering a “loading time-free” experience, letting you start playing your games in under a second.
It remains to be seen, though, whether the new console is able to do this with next-gen games too – being able to load current-gen games much quicker than current hardware is something to be expected, and next-gen games are likely to be much more demanding when it comes to graphics for instance as Forbes points out.
Also, Sony going for an SSD in the PS5 might have another effect besides pushing the price of the console up. This is that the PS5 might ship with a smaller hard drive (say 1 TB) to compensate for the SSDs price, as higher capacity SSDs are exponentially more expensive. And 1 TB (the same amount the PS4 Pro ships with) seems hardly adequate these days, with game sizes booming as we reach the end of this console generation.
Nonetheless, the fact that the PS5 will be shipping with an SSD drive is certainly an exciting development, meaning console gamers will finally get to enjoy the kind of loading speeds savvy PC users have been getting for years, and this can only be a good thing.
Read more: First PlayStation 5 details revealed by Sony
PS4 Pro (Sony Interactive Entertainment)