What To Expect From Sony’s Next-Gen PlayStation

Daetrin writes: Sony is unwilling to confirm “Playstation 5” as the name, but their next console is “no mere upgrade” according to a report from Wired, which cites Sony executives — who spoke on the record: “PlayStation’s next-generation console ticks all those boxes, starting with an AMD chip at the heart of the device. (Warning: some alphabet soup follows.) The CPU is based on the third generation of AMD’s Ryzen line and contains eight cores of the company’s new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. The GPU, a custom variant of Radeon’s Navi family, will support ray tracing, a technique that models the travel of light to simulate complex interactions in 3D environments. While ray tracing is a staple of Hollywood visual effects and is beginning to worm its way into $10,000 high-end processors, no game console has been able to manage it. Yet.” The console will also have a solid-state drive and is currently planned to be backward-compatible with both PS4 games and PSVR.