The PlayStation 4 - Page 44

Former PlayStation Europe chief Jim Ryan will become boss of the entire PlayStation business.

Ryan has served as Sony Interactive Entertainment vice president for around a year, but will switch roles with current president John Kodera on 1st April. Kodera's been in the job a similar short amount of time, since Andrew House left at the end of 2017.

The swap will see Kodera move to focus on growing PlayStation network services, while Ryan takes the helm as Sony readies itself for the leap to a new round of consoles.

Hailing from up north in the UK, Ryan served for years in exec roles within PlayStation Europe. He's appeared at numerous PlayStation press conferences over the years, and isn't afraid to rock a silk shirt.

"It's a huge honour to be asked to take on the role of President and CEO of SIE," Ryan said in a statement. "I've seen the PlayStation business grow and change massively since the very early days, and I hope to be able to put that experience to good use in reinforcing the foundations of the Game & Network Service business, and in evolving the entertainment that PlayStation offers to its engaged and passionate community.

"Working with John [Kodera] and the SIE team around the world, I am committed to strengthening relations with our business partners, and to continuing to provide the ultimate interactive entertainment experiences that make PlayStation the Best Place to Play."

Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 5 looks like it might be a mother of a console, a report from Wired indicated this morning. Featuring a solid state drive and—yes!—backwards compatibility with the PlayStation 4, the PlayStation 5 seems big and bad, although it won’t arrive this year (maybe in 2020, as Kotaku previously reported).

As is expected, the PlayStation 5 will have more powerful specs to match the increased graphics and storage needs for next-gen games. The most exciting bit of news from today’s report is that the PlayStation 5 will have a solid state drive (SSD), a piece of technology that can dramatically speed up loading times between zones in games and rendering time for game environments. Sony did not reveal the SSD’s specs or manufacturer. PlayStation 5 lead system architect Mark Cerny did say, however, that its raw bandwidth should exceed that of what’s currently available for PCs. According to Wired:

To demonstrate, Cerny fires up a PS4 Pro playing Spider-Man, a 2018 PS4 exclusive that he worked on alongside Insomniac Games. . . On the TV, Spidey stands in a small plaza. Cerny presses a button on the controller, initiating a fast-travel interstitial screen. When Spidey reappears in a totally different spot in Manhattan, 15 seconds have elapsed. Then Cerny does the same thing on a next-gen devkit connected to a different TV. (The devkit, an early “low-speed” version, is concealed in a big silver tower, with no visible componentry.) What took 15 seconds now takes less than one: 0.8 seconds, to be exact. . .

On the next-gen console, the camera speeds uptown like it’s mounted to a fighter jet. Periodically, Cerny pauses the action to prove that the surrounding environment remains perfectly crisp.

If you’re wondering about the PlayStation 5's CPU and GPU, we heard those details, too:

PlayStation’s next-generation console ticks all those boxes, starting with an AMD chip at the heart of the device. (Warning: some alphabet soup follows.) The CPU is based on the third generation of AMD’s Ryzen line and contains eight cores of the company’s new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. The GPU, a custom variant of Radeon’s Navi family, will support ray tracing, a technique that models the travel of light to simulate complex interactions in 3D environments. While ray tracing is a staple of Hollywood visual effects and is beginning to worm its way into $10,000 high-end processors, no game console has been able to manage it.

Audio improvements will be a big focus, Wired continued. While “ray tracing” is primarily used for graphics, Cerny notes it can have audio benefits. ““It’s all the same thing as taking a ray through the environment,” he said. It might help players hear small, subtle sounds coming from sneaking-around enemies, for example. “With the next console the dream is to show how dramatically different the audio experience can be when we apply significant amounts of hardware horsepower to it,” said Cerny.

Cerny didn’t give more details about PlayStation 5's VR capabilities, but did note that “VR is very important to us,” adding that the current PSVR headset will work with the upcoming console.

Sony execs are avoiding calling it the “PlayStation 5, instead preferring “next-gen console,” even though every prior model followed the same naming pattern. The PlayStation 4 was released in 2013, seven years after the launch of the PlayStation 3. Should the PlayStation 5 release in 2020, as we’ve reported, then it too will wind up having been Sony’s lead console for seven years.

While Google, Microsoft and, to an extent, Sony have all promoted game-streaming services of late, concrete details confirming the new Sony console reaffirm that the model of owning a box to play games isn’t going away any time soon.

The AMD chip also includes a custom unit for 3D audio that Cerny thinks will redefine what sound can do in a videogame. “As a gamer,” he says, “it's been a little bit of a frustration that audio did not change too much between PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. With the next console the dream is to show how dramatically different the audio experience can be when we apply significant amounts of hardware horsepower to it.”

The result, Cerny says, will make you feel more immersed in the game as sounds come at you from above, from behind, and from the side. While the effect will require no external hardware—it will work through TV speakers and visual surround sound—he allows that the “gold standard” will be headphone audio.

One of the words Cerny uses to describe the audio may be a familiar to those who follow virtual reality: presence, that feeling of existing inside a simulated environment. When he mentions it, I ask him about PlayStation VR, the peripheral system that has sold more than 4 million units since its 2016 release. Specifically, I ask if there will be a next-gen PSVR to go alongside this next console. “I won't go into the details of our VR strategy today,” he says, “beyond saying that VR is very important to us and that the current PSVR headset is compatible with the new console.”

So. New CPU, new GPU, the ability to deliver unprecedented visual and audio effects in a game (and maybe a PSVR sequel at some point). That’s all great, but there’s something else that excites Cerny even more. Something that he calls “a true game changer,” something that more than anything else is “the key to the next generation.” It’s a hard drive.

On April 17 2019 01:28 Plansix wrote:
Yeah, but the PS3 was like $600 at launch and filled with nightmare tech. This system looks fine, I'm just concerned about the buy in price at launch. That really sets the tone for the system going froward. Graphics don't concern me that much because, frankly, we are kinda running up against the limits of what developers can do at a reasonable cost with the current tech.