According to new reports, there’s a major potential for Sony and Microsoft to include SSDs in their newest consoles. At the recent Samsung SSD Forum 2019 held in Tokyo, as reported by PC Watch, Senior Managing Director, Product Planning Team, Memory Electronics Division Han Jinman spoke about the development, pointing out that potential performance gains and reduced cost of using faster storage.
The PS5 allegedly releases in November 2020 for $499. This price point illustrates that Sony will be using a combination of engineering cost-cutting, bulk economy of scale and plenty of leverage to pack in as much performance as possible. At one point during talks, Samsung said that they could work with Sony on pushing Samsung NVMe SSDs into the next generation of consoles. This would be both cost-effective and offer a pretty solid jump in performance.
In addition, he introduced that SSDs are being deployed in the gaming field for consumers, and explained that in 2020, NVMe SSD will be installed not only on PCs but also on consumer game consoles. SSDs are indispensable for comfortable play of game contents that are becoming larger.
Console gaming has been plagued by long load times for years. Anyone who has played some games with multiple load screens knows and hates this trend. Because nothing kills your enjoyment of the game than having to set through minute-long load times every time you change levels. So the inclusion of better storage will definitely be a selling point for many gamers. Sony apparently wants to achieve “no loading times”, and it will be a very hard uphill battle, but a new partnership with Samsung could achieve it.
And even though nothing has been confirmed by Microsoft and Sony, there’s plenty of chance that these rumors could pan out for the better. Both consoles will be pushing the boundaries of console performance, with claims of 4K at 120 FPS being the new benchmark. Sony is even working on a new storage technology that could lead to expandable SSD storage.