PS5’s SSD and Zen 2 CPU Will Be A Boost To Load Times and Heavy Rendering Features – Spirit of the North Dev

We now know – officially – that the PS5 is going to launch in Holiday 2020, and over the past few months, Sony have shared a great deal of new details on their upcoming console. But of all the new info they have shared, the most exciting bits have been the one that came before everything else- the fact that the system is going to have an SSD (which has excited developers quite a bit), and that it’ll be using AMD’s Zen 2 CPU (which is something else that’s going to be a huge boost to development).

We recently conducted an interview with Infuse Studio’s Jacob Sutton – the developers of the upcoming narrative adventure title Spirit of the North – and picked his brain about next-gen hardware, what we know about it, and what all of it, from his perspective as a developer, is going to do for games next generation. And Sutton’s views on both the SSD and the new processor are quite positive.

When speaking about the PS5’s SSD, Sutton commented on how it would improve load times for all games, though he also noted that that’s something that depends on more than just the SSD.

“An SSD will definitely help improve load and save times on all games running on that platform,” said Sutton. “But as an interesting side note- load times also heavily depend on the other hardware in your system. Spirit of the North loads much faster on PS4 Pro than PS4 standard. Even though they have the same sort of hard drive.

Meanwhile, when we asked him about his thoughts on the PS5’s Zen 2 CPU, Sutton said that it would make developing games for the system significantly easier in terms of making use of intensive rendering techniques, while comparing it to his experiences with the difficulties he’s faced in getting his game optimized for the PS4 Pro.

“The PS5 will be much easier to develop for in terms of being able to use much more performance heavy rendering features such as higher quality DFAO, Volumetric Fog, and Ambient Occlusion,” he said. “Just getting the game running on PS4 Pro was a challenge at first when I was trying to figure out the limitations of the hardware. I had to go through and optimize the game countless times and learn more about how rendering works than I ever thought I would know to get the game running decently on both systems.”

In the same interview, Sutton also spoke to us about the PS5 controller’s recently revealed haptic feedback feature– read more on that through here. Our full interview with Sutton will be live soon, so stay tuned to GamingBolt.

Infuse Studio’s Spirit of the North launches exclusively for the PS4 on November 1.