Gamers are still eagerly waiting for the official release date of Sony’s much anticipated next-generation console, the PlayStation 5. In a recent corporate strategic presentation, the company reiterated and highlighted some of the information it had previously released, reassuringly confirming that the PlayStation 5 will have backwards compatibility with the PlayStation 4 since they both have a very similar architectural design.
“We will leverage backwards compatibility to transition our community to next-gen faster and more seamlessly than ever before.”
In a recent interview with Wired, the company’s lead systems analyst Mark Cern described the PS5 as more of a revolution than an evolution, even though the PS5 shared some internal similarities with the PS4.
He added that “The CPU is based on the third generation of AMD’s Ryzen line and contains eight cores of the company’s new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture”.
Perhaps one of the most significant changes gamers will notice is the removal of hard disk drives in favor of SSDs for storage. According to Mark, the PS5 brings a “significant speed bump” for the PS5. To that effect, during the presentation, Sony demonstrated that the PS5 will be around ten times faster than the PS4 Pro when it comes to loading complex scenes.
The PlayStation 5 console will also support 8k graphics and this is what Sony described as very essential, given that 8k TVs are gradually entering into the market. That said, gamers should not expect to see any native 8k games anytime soon.
To encourage early adoption of the PlayStation 5, Sony intends to cash in on its backward compatibility, allowing gamers to still play the games they previously did on the PlayStation 4.
In fact, the company has promised to produce a lot more games for the PlayStation 4, partly due to the fact that the company still expects the console to be very profitable in the next three years. However, some experts have hinted that this could just be a pricing strategy as it is expected that the PlayStation 5 may be priced at a loss and that sales from the PS4 could offset this loss.
When asked In the interview about the official release date for the PS5, Mr. Cern refused to comment however he did not rule out a 2019 launch.