Sony confirms some PS5 specs, shows a big leap for 9th gen consoles

This week we’ve been hit by a whole slew of rumours regarding next generation PlayStation. Now Sony themselves have come out to confirm what’s cooking for the PS5.

In an interview with Wired, Mark Cerny peeled back on the details on what we can expect to find under the hood.

The PS5 will feature an eight-core processor based on AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 2 architecture, along with a custom Navi GPU. It will offer 4K output with upscaling options for future 8K televisions.

The new chip will also boast support for real time ray tracing as well as 3D audio. “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” Cerny told Wired.

Additionally, the PS5 will ditch traditional hard drives for an SSD. While few details have been provided, it appears to be a custom unit which Sony claims will have more raw bandwidth that ones typically found in PCs. Something which should speed up load times significantly the size of games continues to climb higher. So far early dev kit systems show files loading over 15 times faster than the hard drives currently used in the PS4 Pro.

Sony was also able to confirm that the PS5 will be fully backwards compatible with the PS4, and still accept physical media. There was no word on whether it supports other PlayStation consoles, as was rumoured earlier this year. Cerny wrapped up noting that the console will not be releasing in 2019.

A lot of questions still remain unanswered. We don’t know how exactly the console will stack up with current generation consoles, or how much it will cost. Though Cerny did say it will be priced at a point that they feel consumers will be happy with, especially given its beefy hardware. He wrapped up by noting that the PS5 will not be releasing in 2019.

More information will likely come from official sources as the year progresses.