We’ve already heard a lot about how the PlayStation 5’s M.2 SSD will revolutionize gaming, but how true are Sony’s claims, really? According to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, it may be an even bigger deal than we’d been led to believe by proponents such as system architect Mark Cerny. Speaking with The Verge, Sweeney boasted that the PS5’s storage technology is so good that nothing in the current PC market can match it. In fact, it’s so impressive that the PC industry may end up looking at it for inspiration.
“It has an immense amount of GPU power, but also multi-order bandwidth increase in storage management. That’s going to be absolutely critical,” Sweeney said, alluding to the console’s ability to render a world that “might be tens of gigabytes in size” almost instantaneously.
“We’ve been working super close with Sony for quite a long time on storage,” he added. “The storage architecture on the PS5 is far ahead of anything you can buy on anything on PC for any amount of money right now. It’s going to help drive future PCs. [The PC market is] going to see this thing ship and say, ‘Oh wow, SSDs are going to need to catch up with this.”
As The Verge points out, this seems to be less about the raw specifications of the SSD itself, but how Sony built the PlayStation 5 and the software around it to maximize its potential. It’ll be interesting to see how the Xbox Series X, which also flaunts a custom M.2 drive, will compare.