Sony Interactive Entertainment has talked about the PlayStation 5 on two separate occasions this year, yet we still don't know much about the PS5 minus a few talking points and its release window. That said, we do know the next-gen PlayStation console will come packing a custom SSD, which has been hyped up by both Sony and developers who know what the piece of technology means for console gaming. In fact, according to Remedy Entertainment -- the makers of games like Control, Alan Wake, Max Payne, and Quantum Break -- the SSD is PS5's "stand out" feature, and it should know, because the European studio most likely has a developer kit or two already.

"When it comes to the PS5, faster hardware is always appreciated and will make life easier in the short term, but it's the new SSD that really stands out; essentially streaming will become something that we don't really have to worry so much about and it will free up some extra CPU bandwidth in the process," said Remedy's lead programmer Sean Donnelly while speaking to the Official PlayStation Magazine.

For those that don't know: PC gaming has been taking advantage of SSDs for awhile, but not fully. Why? Because console gaming have been holding things back. Most games, especially most big games, are coming to both consoles and PC, and so when designing and developing games, teams are taking into consideration what the PS4 and Xbox One are capable of -- with their mechanical hard-drives -- and so PC ports rarely take full advantage of SSDs.

"For something like Control, that could translate to an even deeper destruction system, richer, more detailed worlds, and simple quality-of-life improvements like instant reloading after dying," said Donnelly speaking about how having a SSD would improve Remedy's most recent game, Control. Basically, a SSD doesn't just mean faster load times. It means less pop-in and more detail, something that will go a very long way for open-world games especially.

That's not all though, as Remedy Entertainment details, a SSD will mean smaller install sizes. Why? Because there will no longer be a need to duplicate data for slow seek times that the optical drives and HDDs in the PS4 and Xbox One have. As you may know, huge download sizes have plagued console gaming this generation, so it's good to hear this should soon be a thing of the past.

At the moment of publishing, the PS5 is slated to release sometime holiday 2020, and this is really the only salient detail Sony has divulged so far.



Posted: Nov 26, 2019 10:07 am
Related Forum: PlayStation Forum

Source: https://comicbook.com/gaming/2019/11/23/ps5-playstation-feature-control/