Sony's PS5 next-generation console will offer improved cloud gaming performance and "dramatically improved graphics rendering" power.
That's the word straight from the company itself, as it showed off a sneak peak at what we're expecting to be called the PlayStation 5 during a corporate strategy presentation.
In a statement sent out following the presentation, Sony said the "two keywords for the future direction of PlayStation are 'immersive' and 'seamless'", with the 'immersive' experience "created by dramatically increased graphics rendering speeds, achieved through the employment of further improved computational power and a customized ultra-fast, broadband SSD".
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Next-gen Remote Play
The company also reinforced the importance of its cloud-gaming plans with Playstation Now, and somewhat surprisingly doubled down on its underused Remote Play feature, saying the "evolution" of this would in the future "provide a seamless game experience anytime, anywhere".
Remote Play is already available as part of the PS4 package, enabling you to stream a game direct from the console to a computer, smartphone, tablet or PS Vita handheld console. But Sony says that going forward it will be "leveraging the latest computing, streaming, cloud, and 5G technologies" to allow it, and the performance of PlayStation Now, to improve.
Sony also showed off a demo of the custom SSD storage system that will be employed in its next-gen machine, again hammering home how it expects super-fast load times to improve the player experience:
Sony's official video comparing performance of PS4 Pro vs next-gen PlayStation pic.twitter.com/2eUROxKFLq21 May 2019
It appears to be the same demo that PlayStation hardware architect Mark Cerny revealed back in April, with Sony suggesting then that the SSD in use is 19 times faster than a standard issue one.
The meeting comes off the back of two key pieces of the puzzle for the PS5 being revealed – firstly, that the next-gen machine will make use of a third-generation, 8-core AMD Ryzen CPU built with 7-nanometer Zen 2 microarchitecture, alongside a customized Radeon Navi GPU capable of ray tracing, and a surprising partnership with Microsoft to bolster the PlayStation Now cloud infrastructure.
Sony's drip feed of information continues to solidify what we can expect from the PlayStation 5 then, although three vital pieces of information remain unknown – its precise name, its launch window and its pricing. Price-to-performance is always a key factor in a console's success, and so far it's difficult to say how Sony will manage to keep the cost attractive and the product financially viable, given the guts it's purported to have.
What this latest showcase suggests though is that, whether in response to the popularity of the Nintendo Switch or the advent of 5G technologies, the next PlayStation will be going increasingly mobile. Remote Play liberates the console experience from the living room via streaming, and its continued reference by Sony suggests it may have a much larger role in the future.
