There have been many rumors floating around regarding the PlayStation 5 and when it will arrive. Will it be 2019? 2020? Sony pulling out of E3 this year and other clues have led us to believe that it won’t be this year, and it appears that this signage has been correct according to a new report where Wired reveals that an exclusive meeting at Sony has detailed that the PlayStation 5 will indeed arrive in 2020 and will be a true generation leap in terms of GPU, CPU, and storage.
It’s hard to believe, but the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One have been kicking around since 2013 and mid-step upgrades of the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro have made things seem shorter than they actually have been. This generation of consoles have been wildly successful for Sony. The PlayStation 4 got off to a great start and that momentum has carried Sony into a wide lead in terms of console sales and it makes a lot of sense that the company would be planning the PlayStation 5 despite other industry trends that point to an all streaming future.
According to the report, the PlayStation 5 will be powered by a eight core AMD Ryzen (3rd generation) CPU, a custom Radeon GPU that supports Ray Tracing, and an SSD (Solid State Drive). The beefy specs of the PlayStation 5 suggest that it will be able to do much more than the consoles that we have now and put it more in line with the strongest gaming PCs that are kitted with the latest and greatest in terms of graphics cards, CPU, and storage.
Other interesting pieces of this report touch on some of the other important facts about the PlayStation 5. One of the areas where Sony has been behind the curve is in terms of backwards compatibility and it seems that Sony will get it right this time around. The PlayStation 5 will be backwards compatible with PlayStation 4 games. The console will be partly based on the PlayStation 4 architecture so PS4 games will be playable on the PlayStation 5. While the industry may be barreling towards an all-digital future, the PS5 will be a physical media machine. This will not be a downloadable only or streaming console.
What’s not known is the price of the PS5 or the exact release date of the console. While this exclusive reveal of their next-gen plans seemed to lay out the specs of the PlayStation 5 the other details are unknown at this point. If the past is any indication, we’ll see Sony ramp up the marketing in 2020 after a quiet 2019 where they’ve pulled away from things like the coming E3 Expo and then release the PlayStation 5 in the fall of 2020.
