Wired has published an article providing first details on the "as-yet-unnamed console that will replace PS4," which has been in development for four years. The media outlet visited Sony Interactive Entertainment headquarters in Foster City, California, where it spoke to lead architect Mark Cerny.
"The key question is whether the console adds another layer to the sorts of experiences you already have access to, or if it allows for fundamental changes in what a game can be," Cerny said.
According to Cerny, the "next-gen console" will not launch in 2019, but a number of studios have been working with it, and Sony recently accelerated its deployment of development kits for the hardware.
The next-generation PlayStation will feature an AMD chip with a custom unit for 3D audio at its core, a CPU based on the third generation of AMD's Ryzen line, eight cores of the company's new 7nm Zen 2 micro-architecture, a specialized solid-slate drive with a raw bandwidth higher than any solid-slate drive available for PC, backwards compatibility with PlayStation 4 titles (previous generations were not confirmed), and support for 8K graphics and physical media. The GPU is a custom variant of Radeon's Navi family, which will support ray tracing.
"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 said. "It's all the same thing as taking a ray through the environment."
