Cognition Dissemination: The Road to PS5 Is Starting Off Gingerly

The PlayStation 5 is due for release in several markets sometime this fall. Given the paltry amount of information we’ve received from Sony, you’d be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t.

At this time before the PlayStation 4’s launch in 2013, we knew of the system’s specs and several pieces of software following the PlayStation Meeting in New York that February. Comparatively, we don’t know anywhere near as much about the PS5. Rumors from so-called insiders about it being revealed in February didn’t pan out, which has resulted in gamers, particularly Sony fans, being excited for when the reveal could actually happen and frustrated about how it hasn’t happened yet. The longer this takes, the more the latter feelings will take over the former.

But hey, we finally got something yesterday. Sony teased the “Road to PS5” stream a little more than 24 hours before it was scheduled to air on YouTube, to much excitement — which increased further when it was revealed to be 52 minutes. Surely they’d come with plenty of information, albeit presented in a livestream form. It quickly became apparent that everyone was too excited for this thing. This was lengthy and extremely detailed walk through the PS5’s tech specs, what potential owners can expect from the hardware’s power.

I want to clearly state that I have the utmost respect for PlayStation lead system architect Mark Cerny, who knows his stuff when it comes to tech and console hardware engineering to say the least. But he’s not the most enthralling guy around. He talked for the entire duration, which gave the presentation the feel of a college lecture. Nostalgic, yes, but personally, I was not entertained.

It also felt very much like a Game Developer’s Conference talk (Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Jim Ryan, implied that it was intended for this), which this would have been present at this week if the event wasn’t cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns. Having the silhouettes of people in the front made me wish for Crow and Tom Servo to start cracking jokes and live critique it. But I don’t want to be too hard on this, because worthwhile info came from it — though not all of it was positive.

Cerny made it clear that the PS5 will be powerful, to no surprise. It will have 10.28 teraflops, 16GB GDDR6 ram, and a 4K UHD Blu-ray Drive, all of which sounds great for a true next-generation console. The biggest attraction here was the 825GB solid-state drive (SSD) this will come packed with, to allow for much faster, if not nonexistent, loading times. The walkthrough of the tech specs seemed like a pretty way of smoothing over how the PS5 will be slightly weaker than Microsoft’s Xbox Series X in every way outside of having a faster hard drive. Granted, faster loading times are important, and it could be a cheaper system. If it’s not, the XSX will be more competitive with the PS5 than the Xbox One to the PS4.

It’s a welcome bit of news that the PS5 won’t have proprietary SSDs, with owners having the option to use other select drives from the market that match the included drive in speed for storage expansion. It was easy to expect the worst when it was revealed that the XSX will have proprietary cards for storage expansion earlier this week. If you owned a Vita or, more topically, an Xbox 360, you know how expensive proprietary storage accessories can get.

Cerny also addressed backwards compatibility, another important feature. But there’s actually bad news here. It was previously implied through Wired’s semi-interview with Cerny that all PS4 games would be playable on PS5. This will disappointingly not be the case, as highlighted in this presentation and on a PlayStation Blog post.

The blog claimed that Sony took the top 100 PS4 games, and will expect “almost all of them to be playable at launch on PS5.” Notice the heavy lifting “almost” is doing there. This means only select games will be playable when the system releases while more from the PS4’s library will be made playable over time, thanks to the PS5’s unique hardware. It’s reminiscent of how Microsoft handled backwards compatibility on XB1 with select 360 and original Xbox games. This also means big AAA games will be prioritized over niche games, so select smaller titles could never be playable.

Update 03/20/2020: Sony updated their blog post on the PS5 specs with more information about its backwards compatibility with the PS4, and it’s fortunately not as bad as it initially sounded. They’ve tested several titles in its library, and expect that “the overwhelming majority of the 4,000+ PS4 titles will be playable on PS5.” This is due to how emulation will work on the upcoming system, where PS4 games will run at a higher frequency to “benefit from higher or more stable frame rates and potentially higher resolutions.” Glad they cleared this up, but it sure took them a short while.

There’s also some confusion here. When Cerny highlighted the PS5 mode and the PS4 Pro and base PS4 legacy modes, several watchers assumed that every game released for PS4 would be playable through the latter modes. The 100 top games, they also presumed, could also be played directly through the PS5 mode. Since several in the enthusiast press have run with headlines saying only around 100 PS4 games will be playable initially and Sony hasn’t bothered to correct the record after more than 24 hours, they must be correct. You’ll always be safer when you assume the worst news is the truth.

This Road to PS5 presentation was the equivalent to a slow start for a long cross-country drive. Cerny mentioned that software will be discussed at some point in the future, ideally the near future if the system is still launching this fall. But hardware and accessory-related questions remain for them to answer, including info about precisely which SSDs will be permitted, the controllers, and the likely VR equipment. You’d think they would have covered all of this in one presentation that took up nearly an hour, but Sony clearly has different priorities in mind.