Sony Offers Sneak Peek Of PlayStation 5 In Action

After months of cancelling and backing out of conferences, gaming giant Sony has unveiled details of its forthcoming PlayStation 5, boasting much faster load times than its predecessor.

The news follows its surprise gaming partnership with major rival Microsoft in an effort to boost cloud gaming services before Google’s Stadia gains too much momentum.

PlayStation will still not be attending gaming conference E3 so while it’s a great first look, it could still be some time before the console hits the market.

It has been speculated that with the new cloud support courtesy of Microsoft’s Azure services, that like the All-Digital Xbox One S, the PlayStation 5 could have game streaming available or a disc-free variant will be sold.

Sony states that it will “leverage existing and new partnerships to achieve growth and scale faster than ever before” leading commentators to speculate that it could expand PlayStation Now, its streaming service currently limited to 19 countries with Australia not among them.

In the presentation, Sony iterated that it “believes in gamer choice” and that next-gen console will support Blu-ray, download, and streaming.

It has revealed that the PS5 with feature a 7nm Zen 2 8-core CPU, a console-first custom ray-tracing GPU based on AMD’s Radeon Navi hardware, and SSD.

This SSD is expected to significantly improve load times, which Sony demonstrated via a video which showed the next-gen console loading Spider-Man in 0.8 seconds compared to 15 seconds on the PS4.

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

— Takashi Mochizuki (@mochi_wsj) May 21, 2019

It is expected to support 8K graphics, “immersive” 3D audio and support discs i.e. it will be backwards compatible with PS4 and VR games.

It is still unknown how much the console will cost, which countries it will roll out to, or when it will arrive.

PlayStation’s Mark Cerny just confirmed it would not launch in 2019, leading many to speculate a 2020 launch.

In the meantime, the company promised more AAA games for the PS4 indicating the company expects this flagship console engine of engagement and profitability for “the next three years”.

The presentation also alluded to its PlayStation Productions announcement and plans to create VR content with Sony Music artists.