During an interview with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, he waxed on about the power of the PlayStation 5, which is coming this fall at the same time that Microsoft is launching the Xbox Series X. But throughout the interview, Sweeney never mentioned the Microsoft console.
“It has an immense amount of GPU power, but also multi-order bandwidth increase in storage management. That’s going to be absolutely critical,” he says. “It’s one thing to render everything that can fit in memory,” he adds, but a much more impressive feat to render a world that “might be tens of gigabytes in size” almost instantaneously, as Sony’s new console and its M.2 solid-state drive are promising.
“We’ve been working super close with Sony for quite a long time on storage,” he says. “The storage architecture on the PS5 is far ahead of anything you can buy on anything on PC for any amount of money right now. It’s going to help drive future PCs. [The PC market is] going to see this thing ship and say, ‘Oh wow, SSDs are going to need to catch up with this.”
He added, “Sony has done an awesome job of architecting a great system here. It’s not just a great GPU, and they didn’t just take the latest PC hardware and upgrade to it, following the path of least resistance. The storage architecture in PlayStation 5 is far ahead of anything that you can buy in any PC for any amount of money right now. It’s great to see that sort of innovation. It’s going to help drive future PCs. They’ll see this thing ship and realize, ‘Wow, with two SSDs, we’ll have to catch up.’”
I don’t know if this means anything, as Epic’s strategy is to spread out on all platforms and not favor a single platform. But it was very interesting to hear the love for Sony.
We’re still waiting on some more crucial details about Sony’s new console, primarily what it will look like, how much it will cost, and whether Sony will have something like Microsoft’s Smart Delivery feature for transitioning purchases made on the PS4 over to the PS5. Sony decided before the annual E3 expo was canceled due to COVID-19 that it would be skipping the large Los Angeles conference and doing its own event, but the company hasn’t revealed its plans for any kind of reveal event to date.
