PlayStation 5: Everything You Need to Know and Some Things You Don't

I wasn't expecting any official information about the next generation of consoles until E3, but Sony's Mark Cerny just went ahead and blabbed some deets (that's cool industry slang for details) about the PS5 (cool industry slang for the PlayStation 5).

Backwards Compatibility

What You Need to Know: The PlayStation 5 builds on the PlayStation 4's architecture, and will be able to play PS4 games.

What You Don't Need to Know: Thanks to the PS5's vastly powerful hardware all PS4 games will be enhanced. Specifically, all games that were originally rendered at 720p will instead be rendered at 721p, and all games that rendered at 1080p will receive a substantial bass boost.

Internal Storage

What You Need to Know: The PS5 will use a solid state drive (FINALLY) to improve load times. Mark Cerny demonstrated the benefits of an SSD by loading a save state in Spider-Man on a PS4 Pro in 18 seconds, then performing the same load on a PS5 development kit in under 1 second.

What You Don't Need to Know: While the SSD will significantly improve the loading times in video games, it will also speed up the system's boot time. This makes it impossible for users to see the system's entire bootup logo sequence. Sony thinks they heard a trumpet, and possibly saw three or four frames of animation in which a "swooshing" PS5 logo began to appear.

Graphics

What You Need to Know: The PlayStation 5 will boast an advanced AMD Ryzen GPU capable of outputting 8K graphics (at a very playable 60fps I'm sure) (that was sarcasm) and implementing some form of ray tracing.

What You Don't Need to Know: While the powerful GPU is capable of pushing graphics to new heights, it comes at the cost of a single shortcoming. The PS5 can only render a maximum of ten rubber ducks in a bathtub at the same time.

Does It Got A Hole For Physical Media

What You Need to Know: It do.

What You Don't Need to Know: Thanks to Sony's incredible hardware engineers, the act of pushing a disc into the slot is now 500% faster. Your fingers are going to be destroyed. It's incredible.

When Does It Come Out

What You Need to Know: Not in 2019.

What You Don't Need to Know: When the console is released in 2020 it will come bundled with a copy of that day's newspaper, to prove that it came out on that day.

Hardware Design

What You Need to Know: Sony has not revealed anything about how the system will look.

What You Don't Need to Know: A reliable source sent me these images of the current prototype.

– Dennis "Corin Tucker's Stalker" Farrell (@DennisFarrell)