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On June 11th, Sony revealed the final design of the PlayStation 5 hardware and showed a long list of trailers to tout the power of the machine. In a reversal of the current generation’s initial graphical power disparity, the PS5 has less-capable graphics performance than the Xbox Series X on paper. Sony is hoping to make up for that by pushing storage and loading performance further than any previous console.
The storage pipeline on consoles has long been neglected, as they’ve continued to rely on slow mechanical hard drives and optical discs. That’s about to change in a big way with the PS5 and Xbox Series X both featuring fast SSDs as their primary local storage devices. Sony is taking this even further with specific motherboard optimizations and their own custom SSD design, claiming that they’ll be able to load games faster than the competition, and stream in large worlds with near-instant speed.
In theory, this means console games will no longer have long obnoxious load screens or have to segment their worlds or limit the number of onscreen assets in order to prevent loading hitches. In practice, it’s unclear how it’ll work out. The Xbox Series X will also load games faster than current…
