Here’s how game developers are reacting to Sony’s PS5 hardware

In case you have been living under a rock, Sony just dropped info on the hardware that will be powering the next generation of PlayStation not too long ago.

The upcoming game console will have:

• An AMD eight-core custom made Zen 2 processor that will be clocked at 3.5 GHz variable frequency.
• A custom made AMD RDNA 2 GPU capable of 10.28 TFLOPs with 36 CUs at 2.23 GHz.
• Will come with 16GB GDDR6 256-bit memory that has a bandwidth of 448GB/s.
• An internal custom design 825GB SSD with an IO Throughput of 5.5GB/s.

The SSD is the linchpin of Sony’s plans with the PS5. As per lead system architect Mark Cerny, the SSD is crucial and was the “number one ask from developers” during the time Sony was consulting with them. They prove useful not just for storage but as a tool to be used as Virtual Memory too, which provides developers with some extra headroom and should make loading screens a thing of the past.

Sony also pointed out that you can swap SSD drives with a larger one if 825GB seems too low, the catch here is that all supported SSDs must hit Sony’s minimum requirements for the console and the SSDs currently available in the market do not. Sony says that it expects supported SSDs to come out by the end of the year.

Cerny also pointed out the PS5 will be moving to a custom-made “Tempest Engine” for audio. The PS5 will be able to support more speakers than what Dolby Atmos currently offers (34) and will have a native 3D audio output.

While all of this sounds awesome on paper, what do the developers who work on Sony’s first-party games think of the specifications?

Besides Sony’s first-party dev team, the PS5 seems to have gotten a few third-party developers excited too:

Originally published at https://warpcore.live on March 20, 2020.