Sony's Mark Cerny has spilled the first beans on the company's next console - which he wouldn't call the PlayStation 5. Most importantly, he confirmed the new console will not be out this year.
In an exclusive interview with Wired, Cerny, the lead architect on the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita, revealed that the next-gen console would not be out in 2019 but it will be a significantly more powerful console than the PlayStation 4.
The next PlayStation console will be capable of ray tracing, the major new graphics tech that is on show in Battlefield 5 on PC. Ray tracing is the accurate simulation of light in 3D environments, and it makes games like breathtakingly good. Cerny explained that ray tracing didn't just provide a graphical upgrade but it can also be used to simulate realistic 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 says. "It's all the same thing as taking a ray through the environment."
The new console will also feature a solid-state drive (SSD), like those found in a lot of PCs. This kind of hard drive is significantly faster at loading data, which has a massive impact on reducing loading screens. Cerny demonstrated to Wired on a dev kit that a loading screen on a PS4 version of Spider-Man takes 15 seconds, but on the next-gen console it took just 0.8 seconds.
These all sound like some pretty mega upgrades. Cerny tells Wired a lot more in its exclusive interview, so do go and give that a read. He also said that we won't be hearing much about it at E3 (Sony, after all, isn't attending this year), so this might be all the new console news we hear for a while.
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