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Naughty Dog president Evan Wells has been talking about PS5 load times in a new interview.
When it launches next fall, PS5 (opens in new tab) will be markedly more powerful than current gen consoles. According to Wells, one of the system’s greatest strengths lies in its upgraded SSD, which could have a greater impact on next-gen games than its CPU and GPU upgrades
“I think [the SSD] will allow us to deliver content in a way that has no friction for the players,” Wells told The Verge (opens in new tab) in a recent interview. “They’ll never have to wait to dive back into their games.”
Consoles have been pushing instantaneous gaming for years now, both through game streaming and system suspend functions, and PS5 and Xbox Project Scarlett (opens in new tab) have the chance to really deliver on that promise. As Wells suggests, the addition of an SSD will cut out a lot of downtime. Just as excitingly, it could expand what developers can do in-game by removing loading constraints.
In a previous interview (opens in new tab), IO Interactive lighting artist Stefania Hernandez explained that “load times can have a big impact on what is possible for game artists. Faster load times give us extra room to add details like props, materials, textures, and lighting, among others, with less impact on performance compared to the previous-generation console.”
We usually associate graphical improvements with a system’s GPU, but in this case, a hard drive upgrade – or solid state drive, more accurately – could give game developers the technical freedom they need to create more detailed worlds, models, and so on. If you don’t have to worry about bloated load times, you can create more, and more intricate, things to be loaded.
A previous report suggested PS5 may use a Samsung NVMe SSD (opens in new tab), one of the fastest drives on the market.
