PS4 system architect lead Mark Cerny gave a press conference on March 18th regarding the technica🎐l specifications of Sony’s upcoming next-gen console. While he threw out a ton of technical jargon and offered up a hearty dose of charts, graphs, and numbers only those in the know would truly grasp, it stands as a rare moment of transparency for Sony, which, unlike their direct rivals in Microsoft’s Xbox team, tends to prefer to keep things under wraps for quite a while. Though much of the internet rema🍸ins bewildered by a conference that didn’t particularly feel tailored to the public, Kurt Margenau, director and designer behind many recent Naughty Dog releases, took to Twitter to voice his support for Sony’s system.
“Still tripping about the #PS5 SSD Spec,” Margenau stated on the social media site. “People don’t even know how big oꦉf a leap in terms of game de🐓sign can be made… by far the biggest leap in my career. Can’t wait.”
Though his emphatic response more or less underlines how Sony’s conference was more aimed at developers than gamers—an odd move when one considers the fact that many of them will have access to PS5 dev kits at this p𒁏oint—it remains heartening for PlayStation loyalists, particularly in the face of the knowledge that the Xbox ꦦSeries X will be just a smidge more powerful than Sony’s Holiday 2020 offering.
While the internet is currently awash with t🐻eraflop comparisons, RAM connection speed discussion, and debate over how exactly 3D audio will be implemented in games, it’s important to underline just how drastically SSD storage speeds w🏅ill impact the future of console gaming. Though the technology has been commercially available for over a decade at this point, it has finally lowered enough in price to the point at which it can be included in mainstream gaming hardware. The fact that eighth-generation consoles still relied on sluggish HDD speeds was a major reason as to why many gamers felt that the initial leap from the PS3 to the PS4 wasn’t all that drastic, and, as Margenau expressed, these advancements could be a literal gamechanger.
Innovative as these changes may be, however, it’s still worth noting that, during an era 🤪in which storage space seems to be at a premium, Sony’s PS5 available as the Xbox Series X. Microsoft’s platform will launch with a full terabyte of SSD space—a huge jump from the Xbox One’s pou🎶ltry 500GB 5400rpm internal HDD—while the PS5 will only come with 850GB. It may seem like an insignificant difference, but, with major AAA releases routinely hogging up more than 100GB of storage space, it could prove to be an issue.
Additionally, both consoles will support expandable SSD storage options not all that dissimilar from the memory cards of yesteryear, but, while Microsoft, in cooperation 🎀with longtime external hard drive manufacturer Seagate, will be producing drives that will boast the same speeds as the Xbox Series X’s internal SSD, Sony’s cards as their console’s internal drive, meaning that PS5 gamers will have to choose which games they want to save to the faster drives and which games they want to relegate to external cards.
Though lots of us are still scratchi🍰ng our heads as to why Sony treated their presentation as an investors pitch rather than a genuine unveiling, as Mark Magenaus vehemently announced, the PS5 is definitely worthy of soꦕme serious hype, and, unlike its predecessor, the system very well could bring about a gaming revolution the likes of which we’ve not seen since the jump from the second to the third dimension twenty-some years ago.