PS5 News — Loading Speed and Cross Generation

The PS5, Sony’s next-gen successor to its hugely popular PlayStation 4 console, may not be out until May 2020 (at the earliest), but that hasn’t stopped the tech company from revealing more about the hardware at a corporate strategy meeting earlier this week.

During the demonstration, the footage that was presented by Sony comparing Spider-Man PS4 running on both the PlayStation 4 Pro system and the PS5 … and tech journalist Takashi Mochizuki recorded the whole thing for public consumption, as seen below. On the PS4 Pro, Sony revealed that Spider-Man PS4 takes about 8.10 seconds to load up, whereas on the PS5, that loading time is reduced to 0.8 seconds. This is probably a demonstration of the fact that Solid State Drives (SSD) will most likely be a major player in next-gen consoles, offering vastly superior file-access speeds and load times compared to traditional spinning-disc Hard Disk Drives (HDD). Although it’s key to remember that this is a PS4 game running on PS5. I don’t expect any PS5 games to load at 0.8 seconds, but maybe 5 seconds … but we won’t know for sure until we get footage of a PS5 game loading.

This drastic reduction in loading times is clearly something that Sony wants to brag about with its next-generation tech, as Mark Cerny demonstrated the same thing when the PS5 was confirmed in April 2019. Other confirmed features of the hardware include backward-compatibility, 8K resolution support, and ray-tracing — alongside the potential for greater quality streaming software.

I will give Sony the benefit of the doubt here that the PS5’s load times will be significantly improved, but this was a PS4 game running on the PS5 hardware. We don’t know if PS5 games will load as fast … Time will tell though.

Also, to be fair, it is unclear whether Sony wanted this footage to be released publicly. The company has exhibited a reluctance to reveal anything more about its next-generation plans other than a few choice details. There’s still plenty of upcoming PS4 games on the way after all, meanwhile Microsoft has kept all its cards to its chest regarding the rumored Xbox Project Scarlett.

Regarding backward-compatibility, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Deputy President and President announced that they are thinking of making the PS5 cross-gen … meaning players from PS4 and PS5 will be able to play together.

Deputy President of Sony Interactive Entertainment, John (Tsuyoshi) Kodera, had this to say about the PS5: “Having compatibility is a positive thing. Not only can a game be played on the next-generation console, cross-generation the community can enjoy the games together … bridging that compatibility has a very important role to play.”

President of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Jim Ryan, followed up saying this on backward-compatibility: “Backwards-compatibility in a networked era is something that’s incredibly powerful. 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 that they have on their next-generation console [with] groups of 10, 20, 50 gamers. We see this, given the size of the community that we’ve been able to accumulate over all these years on PS4, as a really critical success factor for us — we think it’s really important.”

This is pretty nice to hear, as a lot of PS3 gamers weren’t ready to jump to PS4 since they didn’t want to miss playing with their friends.

Are you going to get the PS5 when it launches? Are you even interested in the PS5? Leave your comments below. Stay tuned to GamingLyfe.com for more PS5 news!

Written by
A survivor of the 16-bit console wars, fan or horror films, and pro-wrestling. Lover of all things Sega.

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