Sony’s Mark Cerny has confirmed that PlayStation 5 will come with a brand new SSD. This new and customized PlayStation 5 SSD by Sony is included in the system to make loading times a thing of the past by totally eliminating them.
At the company’s strategy meeting, Sony revealed that the future directions for PlayStation are to be immersive and seamless. Sony plans to achieve these targets with increased power and a custom SSD in PlayStation 5 to speed up loading times.
According to Sony, PS5 loading times will be 19x faster than the loading times on PS4. In addition to this, Mark Cerny told Wired that PlayStation 5 SSD has “a raw bandwidth higher than any SSD available for PCs.” Now that is very impressive.
Furthermore, it was shown in a test demo that PlayStation 5 can load Spider-Man 15 times faster than the PlayStation 4 Pro.
As seen in the demo video, Spider-Man loading times were cut down from 15 seconds to 0.8 seconds on PS5. Do keep in mind that it’s not the final representation of PS5 console so Spiderman loading times are expected to be decreased further.
Sony’s official video comparing performance of PS4 Pro vs next-gen PlayStation pic.twitter.com/2eUROxKFLq
— Takashi Mochizuki (@mochi_wsj) 21 May 2019
At first, Sony will try to eliminate loading times completely within the games built natively for the PS5.
A Sony spokesperson interviewed by Official PlayStation Magazine recently talked about the inclusion of new Sony SSD in PlayStation 5 and what exactly it means for the console. He said that “an ultra-high-speed SSD is the key to our next generation. Our vision is to make loading screens a thing of the past, enabling creators to build new and unique gameplay experiences.”
Now that’s a very bold statement. The next question is how Sony plans to make loading times a thing of the past. Apparently, Sony has answered our question via its latest patent. A new PS5 patent was discovered recently revealing how Sony plans to eliminate loading times with PlayStation 5.
As seen in the patent, PlayStation 5 will make use of the new SSD inside to divide the game environments into various segments. Afterward, PS5 will load these segments dynamically and independently in the background to allow smooth loading transitions without any loading screens. Below is an overview of the patent.
A system and method are disclosed for dynamically loading game software for smooth game play. A load boundary associated with a game environment is identified. A position of a character in the game environment is then monitored. Instructions corresponding to a next game environment are loaded into a memory when the character crosses the load boundary, such that game play is not interrupted.
Interestingly, the games of the current generation have already started to achieve no loading times in some shape or form.
For those who don’t know, there are no loading screens in Red Dead Redemption 2 by Rockstar Games because it uses a similar process described in the patent above.
Overall, the future looks great for console gamers as Sony is trying hard to provide a stress less and seamless gaming experience with PS5. We can expect Sony to talk in detail about the new SSD of PlayStation 5 and how it’s a big difference over PS4 at PlayStation Experience 2019. PlayStation 5 release date is rumored to be set sometime in 2020.
