With each passing week, the thirst of millions of gamers for Sony's and Microsoft's next-gen consoles becomes stronger as we get closer to the planned Holiday season launch (unless the dreaded coronavirus outbreak causes such big production issues to cause delays into 2021).
This also means next-gen console development kits are in the hands of game developers all around the world by now. While there are certain things they cannot say yet, probably because Sony and Microsoft will want to reveal those themselves, many developers are starting to open up about the possibilities enabled by the hardware of PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.
While interviewing Tripwire Interactive (Red Orchestra, Killing Floor, Rising Storm) CEO John Gibson about the upcoming 'SharkPG' Maneater, Kai got the following comment about next-gen consoles.
Without giving away anything I'm under NDA with, I think they're a major generational leap.
Some of the things that people are talking about like SSDs, well, people tend to think about faster GPUs and faster CPUs, but 5200 RPM hard drives are terrible with long load times. We have an open world game like Maneater and it means we can only have the shark move so fast because other things can't stream in in time. It really opens up what you can do with the game. The other things like the faster GPU and CPU, those things are great too, [and] more RAM. All of those things are a pretty big generational leap. I'm really excited about what we'll be able to do with our current and our upcoming games on new hardware.
That's a very similar example to the one we got from Sony when Lead System Architect Mark Cerny first unveiled the possibilities of SSD built into the PS5. At the time, he revealed that Insomniac had to artificially limit Spider-Man's web-swinging speed because the PlayStation 4 could not render the rest of the open world fast enough. This shouldn't be a problem anymore on next-gen hardware.
As a reminder, we don't have full specifications yet for either system. We do know both will pack custom SSD for gaming, an AMD Ryzen based Zen 2 CPU with eight cores, an AMD Navi based GPU with raytracing support, GDDR6 RAM, and dedicated audio chips. Chances are the consoles will be priced higher than PlayStation 4 and Xbox One at launch, though.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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