Sony has just confirmed that its current PSVR headset will be compatible with the next PlayStation console.
The company revealed as much in a new article in Wired. Mark Cerny, the system architect behind the PS4, confirmed that the company is working on a next-generation PlayStation. It’s not called PS5 yet, but it could well be in the future. The article notes that the console will come with a more powerful GPU and CPU with an AMD chip. The latter is based on AMD’s Ryzen line. The GPU, meanwhile, is apparently a variant of Radeon’s Navi line and supports ray tracing.
The biggest draw of the article, though, is a new solid-state drive that claims to drastically reduce load times in games. A demo of Sony’s Spider-Man, for example, cut out fast travel times when accessing the in-game map.
As for VR, Cerny had just one thing to say. “I won’t go into the details of our VR strategy today,” he stated, “beyond saying that VR is very important to us and that the current PSVR headset is compatible with the new console.”
Crucially, though, Cerny also confirms that the console will be backward compatible with the PS4. That makes it likely that we’ll still be able to play the same PSVR games we enjoy today on the next PlayStation. As for if the current PSVR will play new VR games exclusive to the console, Cerny didn’t say. Again, though, it’s likely that we see a new version of the headset for that purpose.
The next PlayStation won’t be releasing this year, but certain developers are already working on it.
That’s quite the bombshell. We’ve seen plenty of Sony patents in the past few months, each of which points towards what PSVR 2 could look like. For now, though, VR fans will at least have a place to play in the next PlayStation.
