Exclusive: What to expect from Sony's next-generation PlayStation

Mark Cerny would be to avoid a problem right now: the video game console built by Sony over the last four years is not a simple upgrade.

You would have good reasons to think otherwise. Sony and Microsoft have both extended the current generation of consoles through a mid-cycle refresh, with the mini-suites that drive Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (Xbox One S and PS4 Pro). "The key question," says Cerny, "is whether the console adds an extra layer to the types of experiences you already have access to, or if it allows fundamental changes in what a game can be."

The answer, in this case, is the last one. That's why we're sitting here, hidden in a conference room at Sony's headquarters in Foster City, California, where Cerny finally details the inner workings of the still unknown console that will replace the PS4.

If the story is a guide, it will eventually be called the PlayStation 5. For now, Cerny answers this question – and many more – with an enigmatic smile. The "new generation console", as he mentions many times, will never be unloaded in stores in 2019. A number of studios have worked with, however, and Sony has recently accelerated its devkits deployment so that the creators of games will have the time needed to adapt to his abilities.

As he did for the PS4, Cerny acted as the main architect of the upcoming system, integrating the wishes of the developers and his own hopes for gaming into a much larger revolution than evolution. For over 90 million people who own PS4s, that's good news. Sony has a brand new case.

A real generation change tends to include some basic adjustments. The processor and graphics processor of a console become more powerful, able to provide a graphical fidelity and visual effects previously inaccessible. system memory increases in size and speed; and game files grow to match, requiring larger downloads or larger physical media such as disks.

The new generation PlayStation console meets all these needs, starting with an AMD chip in the heart of the device. (Caution: an alphabet soup follows.) The processor is based on AMD's third-generation Ryzen line and contains eight cores of the company's new 7 nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. The GPU, a custom variant of the Radeon Navi family, will support ray tracing, a technique that models the movement of light to simulate complex interactions in 3D environments. While ray tracing is a staple of Hollywood visual effects and as it begins to make its way into the $ 10,000 high-end processors, no gaming console has been able to manage. Again.

The immediate benefits of ray tracing are largely visual. Because it mimics how light bounces from one object to another in a scene, reflective surfaces and refractions through glass or liquids can be rendered much more precisely, even in real time, which leads to increased realism. According to Cerny, the applications go beyond the graphic implications. "If you want to do tests to see if the player can hear some audio sources or if enemies can hear the player's footsteps, ray tracing is useful for that," he says. "It's all the same as taking a radius through the environment."

The AMD chip also includes a custom 3D audio unit that, according to Cerny, will redefine what sound can do in a video game. "As a player," he explains, "it's a little frustrating that the audio has not changed too much between PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. With the next console, the dream is to show how much the audio experience can be radically different we apply significant amounts of material power to it. "

According to Cerny, the result will allow you to feel more immersed in the game when the sounds reach you from above, from behind and from the side. Although the effect requires no external hardware (it will work with the TV speakers and surround sound visual), it allows the "reference standard" to be the sound of the headphones.

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

So. New processor, new graphics processor, ability to produce unprecedented visual and audio effects in a game (and possibly a PSVR suite). It's great, but there's something else that excites Cerny even more. One thing he calls "a true game changer", something that is more than anything else "the key to the next generation". It's a hard drive.

The biggest the game starts Red Dead Redemption 2 99 gigabytes for the PS4: the longer it takes to do everything. The loading of the screens can last a few minutes, the time that the game draws what it needs of the hard disk. The same goes for "fast travels" when characters move between distant points in a gaming world. Even opening a door can take more than a minute, depending on what is in the game. on the other side and the amount of data that the game has to load. Starting in the fall of 2015, when Cerny started talking to developers about what they wanted from the next generation, he heard over and over again: I know it's impossible, but can we have an SSD?

SSDs have been available in discount laptops for more than a decade, and the Xbox One and PS4 both offer external SSDs that claim to improve load times. But not all SSDs are created in the same way. As Cerny points out, "I have an SSD in my laptop and I can wait 15 seconds when I want to go from Excel to Word." What's in the next-generation Sony console is something like a little more specialized.

To demonstrate, Cerny triggers a PS4 Pro playing Spider Man, an exclusive PS4 2018 on which he worked alongside Insomniac Games. (Cerny created the arcade classic Marble madness when he was 19 years old and that he was very involved in PlayStation and PS2 franchises such as Crash Bandicoot, Spyro The Dragon, Ratchet and Clank.) On TV, Spidey stands in a small place. Cerny presses a controller button to launch a fast moving interstitial screen. Fifteen seconds passed when Spidey reappeared at a place totally different from Manhattan. Then Cerny does the same thing on a new generation devkit connected to a different TV. (The devkit, an early "low speed" version, is concealed in a large silver tower, with no visible component.) What took 15 seconds now takes less than one: 0.8 seconds, to be exact.

This is just one of the consequences of an SSD drive. There is also the speed with which a world can be rendered, and therefore the speed with which a character can move through this world. Cerny performs a similar demonstration of two consoles, this time with the camera that climbs one of the avenues of Midtown. On the original PS4, the camera moves at Spidey speed as it launches. "Whatever the power of your Spider-Man, you can never go faster," says Cerny, "because it's how fast we can extract data from the hard drive." On the next-generation console , the speed of the camera in the upscale neighborhoods is as if it were mounted on a fighter plane. Cerny periodically interrupts the action to prove that the environment remains perfectly clear. (While the next-gen console will support 8K graphics, the TVs that provide them are rare, so we use a 4K TV.)

What developers can do is something that Cerny can not answer yet, because they are always aware of everything. But he considers that the SSD opens the door to a new era, upsetting the tropes that have become the foundation of the game. "We're very used to displaying logos at the beginning of the game and very graphic selection screens," he says. he, "even things like multiplayer lobbies and deliberately detailed loading processes, because you do not want players to wait. "

For now, Sony does not need to know the exact details of the SSD – who makes it, whether or not it uses the new PCIe 4.0 standard – but Cerny says it has a higher raw bandwidth than that of any available SSD for PCs. This is not everything. "The raw read speed is important," says Cerny, "but the details of the I / O interface are too. [input-output] mechanisms and the stack of software that we put on them. I have a PlayStation 4 Pro, then an SSD that costs as much as the PlayStation 4 Pro. This could be a third faster. "Instead of 19 times faster for the new generation console, judging by the speed of demo travel.

As you can see, it's all about hardware. Cerny is not ready to discuss services or other features, let alone games and pricing, and no one at Sony. You will not hear much about the console at E3 in June, because for the first time, Sony will not be making speeches at the annual games fair. But a few other things stand out in our conversation. For example, the next-generation console will still accept physical media. it will not be a download machine only. Because it relies in part on the architecture of the PS4, it will also be backward compatible with the games of this console. As in many other generational transitions, it will be a sweet one, with the release of many new games for PS4 and the next-gen console. (Where exactly the next title of Hideo Kojima Grounding of death s' registered in this process is still unconfirmed. When asked, a spokesman in the room reiterated that the game would be available on PS4, but Cerny's smile and his pregnant pause invite speculation that it will be a release on two platforms. )

What will the game look like in a year or two, let alone in 10 years, is debated. Battle-Royal games have redefined multiplayer experiences; Augmented reality marries the fantastic and the real in an unprecedented way. Google stands out from traditional consoles by launching a cloud gaming service, Stadia, later this year. The next version of Microsoft's Xbox will likely integrate cloud gaming to allow users to play Xbox games on multiple devices. Sony's plans in this regard are still unclear. Cerny stands by herself and declares that "we are pioneers of online gaming, and that our vision should become clear as we move towards launch", but it's hard to think it's n & # 39; There will be no more news coming on this front.

For the moment, there is the living room. This is where the PlayStation has sat for four generations and will continue to do so for at least another generation.

More great cable stories