Sony Unveils More Details of the PS5, Promises Backward Compatibility
Sony has been surprisingly open about the design of the upcoming PlayStation 5. The company has unveiled new details about its strategy for the platform at a corporate presentation, including demonstrating improved load times in Spider-Man and promising full backward compatibility as well as PlayStation VR support.
The PS5 won’t be the first console to offer backward-compatibility out of the gate, but it should be able to do so with vastly less difficulty or cost than previous platform iterations. Up until now, every time Sony has provided hardware-level backward compatibility, it has done so using a miniaturized version of the previous console implemented directly in the next-generation platform. To be clear, we don’t know for absolute certain that Sony hasn’t done this, but it’s unlikely. Because the PS5 is based on the same x86 architecture and a similar GPU, providing backward compatibility in software shouldn’t be much (if any) harder than booting up a game you played back in 2013 on a 2019 system.
The Ryzen CPU at the heart of the PS5 isn’t based on the same core architecture as the Jaguar core that powered the PS4, but the beauty of architectural compatibility is that this shouldn’t matter. And Sony is banking hard on showing the improvements that it can offer with an updated system architecture, including the gains it sees from adopting an SSD instead of an HDD, as shown in the video below:
Sony's official video comparing performance of PS4 Pro vs next-gen PlayStation pic.twitter.com/2eUROxKFLq
— Takashi Mochizuki (@mochi_wsj) May 21, 2019
Despite the reminder that Sony has spoken about 8K, nobody is reading that as a promise for support for 8K gaming. The resolution is simply too high, and too far beyond the range of any hardware expected to be suitable for the console market in 2019. Other features, like ray tracing support, may be practically supported, but it’s uncertain how much we’ll see them used. Not every console feature winds up widely supported. The original Xbox 360 supported tessellation, though I’m not sure any game ever used the feature, for example. 3D audio capabilities tend to be something the console companies talk about in the run-up to launch, but games that make extensive use of positional audio as a major gameplay element are few and far between, mostly because you can’t automatically assume players have sound systems that can take advantage of these features.
Sony has said it believes game streaming is critical to its overall future and has signed a major deal with Microsoft to collaborate on game streaming going forward, but it won’t be abandoning disc-based players. PS4 games will play on the PS5, and the PS5 will also have a physical media option of its own. Sony did say, however, that “we believe the streaming era is upon us and is about to begin a period of rapid growth.”
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