Last month, Sony shared the first details about its upcoming PlayStation 5 console, revealing that the new system will support 8K graphics, Ray tracing, 3D audio, as well as backwards compatibility. In addition to the all new AMD CPU and GPU, Playstation system architect Mark Cerny also said to Wired that the console would include a next-gen SSD providing much faster loading times.
The Wired report recounted a two-console demonstration where Cerny showed that loading times in the PS4 exclusive Spiderman game were 19 times faster on the PS5 dev kit. Well, Sony showcased a similar demo at an investor conference this week, and a video of it has been published by WSJ journalist Takashi Mochizuki on Twitter (via Eurogamer).
Sony's official video comparing performance of PS4 Pro vs next-gen PlayStation pic.twitter.com/2eUROxKFLq
— Takashi Mochizuki (@6d6f636869) May 21, 2019
The first part of the demo shows the PS5 complete a fast travel sequence in the Spiderman game in just 0.83 seconds, compared to 8.1 seconds for the PlayStation 4. The second part of the video showcases insanely fast traversal speeds on the PS5, while the same sequence on a PS4 is interrupted a couple times as the console can’t stream new information fast enough.
The rest of the investor conference didn’t include additional PlayStation 5 details, but Sony did share some new hard data about its PlayStation ecosystem. There are currently 94M+ Playstation Network monthly active users (Xbox Live had 63M monthly active users in Microsoft’s last financial quarter), and Sony expects its PlayStation 4 install base to cross 100M units this year.
As for PlayStation Now, Sony’s gaming subscription service currently has 700K subscribers across 19 countries. Sony said that existing capacity investments support a 5 million subscriber base, but the company recently announced that will explore the use of Microsoft Azure to boost its cloud services. The company will certainly need that if it wants to compete with Microsoft’s Project xCloud, Google Stadia, and other cloud streaming services from Amazon or EA.