Sony Demos PlayStation 5; ‘Incredibly Powerful’ Features For Next-generation Console

Sony shied away from holding the traditional E3 press conference in preference of a more gradual approach. The company recently gave gamers a sneak peek of its next-generation PlayStation console and even hinted at cloud gaming as its future frontier.

The PlayStation 5 is set to come with a host of exciting features including full support for 8K graphics, 3D audio, SSD storage, and backward compatibility with existing PlayStation 4 titles.

The SSD storage was meant to boost load times significantly and sony demonstrated just that in a video it shared.

The company recently held its investor relations meeting where it demonstrated PS5 load times using Spider-Man to load cities and rapidly navigate through them. While its predecessor PS4 takes around eight seconds, the next-generation PS5 does it in less than a second.

The sheer power in this console is also demonstrated in how it effortlessly handles dynamic maps that load portions of a game as a player moves through them, doing away with the classic spinning circle when you move from the part of the map to another.

While the company is currently focused on its next-generation PlayStation 5 console, it also admits that the PS4 will “remain the engine of engagement and profitability in the next three years” and will be an early starting point for the next generation of PlayStation.

“Backwards compatibility, in a networked era, becomes something that is incredibly powerful,” said PlayStation boss Jim Ryan. “Because the gaming community is somewhat tribal in its nature, backward compatibility gives us the opportunity to migrate that community from PlayStation 4 to next-gen using the ability to play the PS4 games they have on their next-generation console. So we see this, given the size of the community that we’ve been able to accumulate over all these years and hard work on PlayStation 4 as a really critical success factor for us. We think it’s incredibly important.”

Sony also revealed that the PS5 will be powered by an eight-core CPU based on AMD’s third-generation Ryzen line. And include a GPU that supports ray-tracing graphics. The company, however, yet to demonstrate Ray-tracing on the PS5.

The pricing and release dates for this magnificent gaming machine are yet to be communicated. Games and the general user experience for the PS5 console are not expected any time soon-(at least not in the next 12 months).

But Sony has hinted at Cloud gaming as its next frontier as the company plans to leverage its existing PlayStation Now network to support 1080p and beyond games while improving the gamer experience through maximizing what it describes as its “Off-console opportunity