Sony has shown an early PlayStation 5 tech demo at an investor conference, captured for posterity by Wall Street Journal Tokyo journalist Takashi Mochizuki and embedded further on down this page. The demo – or a variant of it – was previously shown to Wired magazine, highlighting the enormous streaming and loading time advantages offered by the proprietary SSD technology that finds its way into Sony’s next generation PlayStation.
The presentation is based on Marvel’s Spider-Man, developed by Insomniac Games. It starts off by showing a series of ‘fast travel’ warps around the game’s New York map, with the PS4 Pro taking 8.1 seconds to complete a single jump. By contrast, the next generation hardware completes the same process in just 0.83 seconds. Roughly speaking, loading times are improved by an order of magnitude.
The second element of the demo focuses on streaming open world data. In the original Wired piece, PlayStation system architect Mark Cerny explained that the speed of traversal in Spider-Man is limited by the constraints of the PS4 Pro hardware. The video shows this in action: as speed is increased, the PS4 Pro grinds to a halt as it streams in new information, with buildings popping in before the sequence starts up again. The same sequence on the new hardware shows traversal at jet fighter speeds, with no hitching or stuttering whatsoever.
Source: Eurogamer PlayStation 5 tech demo footage surfaces at investor conference