When the PlayStation 5 had its specs revealed in an exclusive story with Wired, there was quite the hype around what it could do. Subsequent presentations showcasing the speed of the solid state drive, especially when it comes to recent PS4 games like Spider-Man, are only that much more exciting. The question is: What do other developers, like Blackmill Games of Verdun and Tannenberg fame, think about it?
We had a chance to speak to Blackmill Games’ Jos Hoebe about the PS5’s specs and what he thought about them. He said, “We’re always happy with more powerful hardware as that can make our job easier… although, since consumer expectations rise along with the hardware quality that’s not always the case in the end, haha.
“We’re most excited about the SSD drives as that will make one of the biggest differences: finally, speedy console loading times!”
The PS5 will sport, among other things, an AMD Zen 2 CPU, which is a big jump over the PS4’s Jaguar. What impact will this have on development? Hoebe said, “We use the Unity game engine for all our games, and we are always CPU bottlenecked. So with such an improvement to our weakest link (CPU), it will help greatly for getting better performance and producing better looking games.”
Over the past day, we’ve learned that the PlayStation 5 will also use the AMD Radeon Navi with its new RDNA design. It boasts 1.5 times the performance-per-watt and 1.25 times the performance-per-clock of GCN, along with including a new compute unit design. It will be a while until we see PS5 games in action though, so stay tuned in the coming months for more details.