The 8 most important details we already know about PlayStation 5, Sony's next-generation video game console

Death Stranding

Sony's next PlayStation console is deep into production, and is expected to arrive in 2020.
The first details about the new console were revealed in an interview with Wired on Tuesday.
As expected, the next PlayStation is promised to be more powerful than the existing PlayStation — but we also learned a lot more.
Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.

Who's ready for the PlayStation 5?

At the very least, Sony clearly is — the company detailed the successor to the PlayStation 4 in an interview with Wired on Tuesday, where it discussed everything from the specific chips powering the console to when it's expected to launch. (Spoiler: not this year!)

Here are all the most important things we just learned about the next major PlayStation console:

1. It will have much nicer graphics.

Unlike the PlayStation 4 Pro and the Xbox One X — half-step consoles that offered more power in the same console generation — the new PlayStation "allows for fundamental changes in what a game can be," Mark Cerny, Sony's lead system architect, told Wired.

Core to that mission is the new console's processing chips: a new central processing unit and a graphics processing unit from AMD. The former is based on AMD's Ryzen line, while the latter is part of Radeon's Navi GPU line.

What that means for you: The PlayStation 5 is built on chips that are yet-to-be-released.

2. It will have much faster — or almost non-existent — load times.

When you think of flashy new video game consoles, you probably don't think too much about hard drives — the thing you store games and game saves on.

But Cerny told Wired that the next PlayStation's hard drive is, "a true game changer." Why's that? Because, for the first time ever, the next PlayStation will come with a solid state drive.

What's different about that? It's much, much faster than a traditional hard disc drive. In a demonstration of the new drive, 2018's "Marvel's Spider-Man" was loaded up on an early development kit for the next PlayStation — it demonstrated a reduction in load times from 15 seconds to less than a single second.

That indeed could be a game-changer. Just imagine all the time you've wasted waiting for games to load — now, imagine that being erased permanently.

3. It's capable of producing 8K visuals.

8K? Yes, 8K — as in "the next step for television resolutions after 4K." And yes, you probably just got a 4K television. (Even more likely: You still don't have a 4K television!)

That's fine. Though the PlayStation 5 will apparently be capable of producing 8K visuals, we don't expect that any games will take advantage of that for some time. After all, there are barely any 8K sets available for sale, let alone a large audience of people waiting for 8K content.

This capability seems more like a measure of future-proofing against what will come next rather than a new standard for visual fidelity.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider