We’re still more than year out from these new consoles actually hitting the market, but make no mistake: the next-gen console wars officially kicked off yesterday, when Sony officially unveiled the PS5–called only “next-generation”, but let’s just call it PS5–via an exclusive piece in Wired. The new machine will be backwards compatible and will feature and SSD and a GPU built off of AMD’s Ryzen line. We don’t know the price, we don’t know anything about the launch lineup, we don’t know anything about how new subscription services or streaming will factor in, but we know a whole lot more than we did two days ago. The PS5 is now a real thing that we can talk about in terms that aren’t pure speculation.
For the most part, nothing we know about the PS5 is hugely surprising. That was Sony’s tactic with the PS4: release a generational upgrade that doesn’t change the core concept, with a few new features to boot. So far that’s what we’re seeing here, though again there are a lot of questions to be asked going forward. The biggest part of those generational upgrades, however, has got to be the SSD, or Solid State Drive. This will allow the PS5 to load games much more quickly than a traditional HDD, as anyone that’s used an SSD on a PC can tell you. The Wired article features a demo using Spider-Man, which is only so useful because it only shows us how fast the PS5 can load a PS4 game. But I get the feeling that when this machine hits the market, the SSD and reduced loading times are going to be the most noticeable difference.
This is the hardware feature that Microsoft will have to match in its high-end next-generation Xbox. The company is likely going to make two new Xboxes, one for budget consumers and one for the sort of high-end gamer that would normally buy launch hardware. We’re talking about the high-end one here, which will be the most direct competition for the PS5. And now that Sony has set the bar, it’s going to be very noticeable if that thing doesn’t have an SSD. That would mean that both of these machines would be loading the same third-party games at wildly different rates, leading to the same sort of unfavorable comparisons that dogged the Xbox One earlier in the generation with resolution and frame rate.
We don’t know anything about Microsoft’s machines, so it’s entirely possible that the high-end machine will have an SSD, and here’s hoping. Without that, Microsoft will likely have to compete on price, something that would, of course, be easier to do without an expensive hard drive in there.
This is one of the major things I’ll be watching for when Microsoft unveils its new machine(s). Whatever decision the company has made is likely set in stone at this point, so I wouldn’t expect anyone to scramble and change things around. But as far as features go, this is a big one. Of course, Microsoft could always still come out ahead via its budget machine, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish.