Watch Sony flexing their next-gen Playstation’s lightning-fast loading times

In an exclusive interview with Sony’s PlayStation 5 lead system architect Mark Cerny, WIRED managed to get some juicy details about the next-generation console. One particularly exciting highlight was when Cerny did a demo of the fast-travel loading times in last year's Spider-Man — what would take the PS4 Pro 15 seconds to process, the next-gen devkit took 0.8 seconds. 

Now, we get to see just that thanks to Wall Street Journal reporter Takashi Mochizuki, who attended a Sony investor relations meeting yesterday.

On Twitter, he shared a video that showcased Sony’s official video on the super-fast loading times of their next-gen console. 

Sony's official video comparing performance of PS4 Pro vs next-gen PlayStation pic.twitter.com/2eUROxKFLq

— Takashi Mochizuki (@mochi_wsj) May 21, 2019

The meeting also saw the company stating that the two keywords for the future direction of PlayStation are “immersive” and “seamless".

They continued that the "immersive" aspect will be "created by dramatically increased graphics rendering speeds, achieved through the employment of further improved computational power and a customised ultra-fast, broadband SSD".

The console will also feature 8K graphics and have faster loading times after swapping the mechanical hard drives to faster solid-state storage (SSDs).

What is official and what isn't about next-generation PlayStation console? From sony at https://t.co/1JRZBg4LhK pic.twitter.com/eV6MWWKeWq

— Takashi Mochizuki (@mochi_wsj) May 21, 2019

Cerny revealed it will be much faster and have higher quality audio thanks to an AMD chip with a unit for 3D audio, which he believes is powerful enough to change the whole video game landscape.

"As a gamer, it's been a little bit of a frustration that audio did not change too much between PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4,” he said. 

"With the next console, the dream is to show how dramatically different the audio experience can be when we apply significant amounts of hardware horsepower to it."

One aspect Cerny didn't want to touch on was their VR plans, but the PS5 will be compatible with their PSVR headset range.

He told the publication: "I won't go into the details of our VR strategy today, beyond saying that VR is very important to us and that the current PSVR headset is compatible with the new console."

Cerny didn't give any idea of when the device would be released but said it won't be this year.

The meeting also hinted at cloud gaming, but Sony did not dive deep into the matter. In a bid to take on Google’s upcoming Stadia cloud gaming feature, Sony teamed up with longtime rival Microsoft to figure out a way to expand both their future game streaming services. 

ilyas@asiaone.com