Following the announcement of the PlayStation 4 Pro last month, Sony’s Shawn Layden said “there will be more PlayStations.” It could be quite some time before we see them though, with Andrew House adding, “We think that for a really substantial period of time this is the PlayStation 4 lineup [PS4, PS4 Slim, PS4 Pro]. We’re very comfortable with that.”
At the time, it remained to be seen if Sony was referencing another PS4 hardware revision in the future, or if they would go to the PS5 after the PS4 Pro. In lead system architect Mark Cerny’s technical presentation about the Pro earlier this week, he revealed that Sony doesn’t think console generations are a thing of the past:
We don’t believe that generations are going away. They are truly healthy for the industry, and for the gaming community. It’s just that the objectives for PS4 Pro are quite different.
Noting that “PS4 Pro is not the start of a new generation” and “that is a very good thing,” Cerny said the targets of the Pro are support of high-res displays, 4K displays, higher frame-rates, and 4K streaming.
After telling Gamasutra about how they were able to reduce the amount of work required for a developer to support the PS4 Pro, Cerny added:
Also, as a mid-generation hardware release, we wanted to have something that would have complete interoperability with the standard model. To put that a different way, we knew we couldn’t go back to the teams that created the 700 or so existing games [on PS4], and ask some significant percentage of them to open up their code-base and make it work properly on the [PS4 Pro]. The games just needed to work. At the same time, the console needed to have a high impact for the consumers, so we chose to focus on improved graphics, including better support for new TV formats and smoother frame-rates.
Eurogamer also spoke with Cerny this week and offered their thoughts on the future. “I came away with the impression that PS5 will be a clean break, an actual generational leap as we know it,” Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter wrote.
