Sony’s PlayStation 5 will play games in 8K, feature AMD chips

Concrete details of Sony’s next-generation PlayStation gaming console have broken cover. Finally.

We’ve been treated to a mid-fourth generation micro-upgrade from both PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox division in the form of 4K-supporting consoles.

However, what we’d love to call the PlayStation 5 but Sony refers to as its “next generation console”, will support native 8K resolution.

In an exclusive published by Wired, Sony’s PlayStation system architect Mark Cerny further revealed that the innards of the console Sony has been working on for the past four years will be AMD through and through.

The console will sport a 7nm AMD Ryzen Zen 2-based chipset at its heart, with an AMD Radeon Navi-based GPU. The latter will also support ray tracing, which should signal more immersive lighting scenes in future titles.

The chipset will also support a “custom unit for 3D audio” which will present more realistic surround sound especially through headphones.

Finally, the PlayStation 5 will also include a new SSD storage system, based on the PCIe 4.0 standard. Cerny also notes that the PlayStation 5’s SSD’s bandwidth will be higher than SSDs currently available on high-end PCs.

Cerny and Sony PlayStation did not suggest when we’ll see the company’s next-generation console, but the future of couch gaming does sound extremely promising.

Read the excellent Wired exclusive here.

Feature image: Andy Walker/Memeburn