Developer Mark Cerny Offers First Details On Sony's Upcoming 'Next-Gen' PlayStation, Or PS5

While Microsoft confirmed they were working on the "next generation of Xbox" at the annual E3 in 2018, there hasn’t been as much heard about the future of PlayStation.

Sony fans can now rest as easy as Mark Cerny has pulled back the curtain to the first details on the next generation of PlayStation. In an interview with Wired, Cerny laid out some of the features that fans can expect from the next-gen model of PlayStation.

For those who are unfamiliar, Cerny served as the lead architect and producer on the PlayStation 4. He is once again working in the same position for what is simply being referred to in media as the PS5.

Just to keep expectations tempered, Cerny made sure to clarify that the system won’t be available in 2019. On the flip side, he did reveal that the system is already four years into development and Sony has been working to get development kits out faster for studios to start developing titles.

As for the system, the PS5 will feature a built-in disc drive and won’t be making a hard shift to digital only. The question surrounding an included disc-drive is fair, given the rumors around the all-digital Xbox One S that could be available sooner rather than later.

But on top of that, the PS5 will also take a page out of the Xbox One and allow for backward compatibility with PS4 games.

In regards to the architecture, the heart of the PS5 will use CPUs based on the third gen of the AMD Ryzen line and has eight of the new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture cores. The AMD CPU will also feature a custom piece for 3D audio.

It will also sport a custom GPU based on Radeon's Navi to support ray tracing. Ray tracing is a technique used in Hollywood special effects to model the travel of light to simulate complex interactions in 3D environments.

"If you wanted to run tests to see if the player can hear certain audio sources or if the enemies can hear the players’ footsteps, ray tracing is useful for that. It's all the same thing as taking a ray through the environment," Cerny said about ray tracing.

Next, the PS5 will include a solid state drive, which is becoming more common in computers and smart devices for storage and performance. Cerny highlighted the benefits this will have on the latter, playing "Spider-Man" on a PS4 to show the 15 second open-world load times. When Cerny loaded "Spider-Man" into the PS5, that load time dropped to less than one second.

And for the visuals, the PS5 will be able to support 8K resolutions and be PS VR compatible. Supporting 8K will help futureproof the PS5 for some time versus what happened with the PS4 being a little behind when it came to full 4K support.

To close out, Cerny teased that a few upcoming games could even be multi-platform titles between the PS4 and PS5, with Cerny loosely teasing Hideo Kojima’s upcoming game, "Death Stranding," could find its way to the PS5.