Sony's next PlayStation console, widely thought to be named PlayStation 5, will play both PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 games. It will have a solid-state hard drive to load games much faster, and it will still read physical game discs despite persistent rumors of console makers moving toward download-only consoles.
These are just a few of the major new details revealed on Tuesday in a surprisingly direct set of answers to Wired about Sony's next-generation game console.
The new console is already being shipped as a development kit to game developers all over the world, though it won't arrive for consumers this year.
Unlike the PlayStation 4 Pro and the Xbox One X — half-step consoles that offered more power in the same console generation — the new PlayStation "allows for fundamental changes in what a game can be," Mark Cerny, Sony's lead system architect, told Wired.
Core to that mission is the new console's processing chips: a new central processing unit and a graphics processing unit from AMD, capable of supporting ray tracing, a method for producing more stunning visuals in computer graphics.
Additionally, the new console will continue to support PlayStation VR — and it may even get a new, updated version of PlayStation VR, but Sony didn't confirm as much.
Sony also didn't speak to its plans for cloud gaming, or whether your PlayStation 4 digital game library would transfer to the new console. Those details, and many others, are likely to come out in the next year leading up to the launch of Sony's next console.
