Sony’s new PlayStation 5 will be pushing the bar for consoles and enter into the next generation of gaming. Players are currently expecting the standards of new technology including a solid-state drive, ray tracing support, 8k resolution graphics, and wireless controllers. With top of the line hardware, Sony will be pushing cloud gaming services and maximizing the quality of these games.
That being said, some things remain standard as technology progresses, but some norms of gaming might be on their way out. Sony has filed a continuation patent which was approved by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday. The patent goes into describing a new way of splitting up the game environment to enable smooth transitions rather than the standard loading screen that has plagued gamers for console generations.
The concept is simple and has been used by many games in recent years. The Batman Arkham series and Ubisoft’s Assassins Creed franchise both used similar styles of loading. The system is designed to split the game up into different sections and then load only the adjacent parts. This limits how much is needed to be loaded and helps create massive worlds. Due to the adjacent segment already being loaded, a smooth transition happens as players traverse the land.
“A system and method are disclosed for dynamically loading game software for smooth game play. A load boundary associated with a game environment is identified. A position of a character in the game environment is then monitored. Instructions corresponding to a next game environment are loaded into a memory when the character crosses the load boundary, such that game play is not interrupted.” reads the patent’s abstract.
Consoles are just condensed specialized computers. This means that when you are loading a game, the console is transferring data from the hard disk memory into the random access memory or RAM. The loading screen is meant to buy time for this transfer as the game renders in graphics and frees up unneeded space. Although modern consoles are a long way from eliminating all wait times, Sony seems to be in the process of optimizing the loading time to almost negligible lengths.
Eliminating loading screens would cause a significant impact on games like Fallout or Skyrim, which is full of loading screens whenever you enter a building. Sony will make this an almost seamless feature as the opening of a door would instantly load, increasing the immersion of the realm.
The PS5 is using a solid-state drive with the state of the art RAM tech which has been named GDDR6 RAM. It is surprisingly effective at editing, writing, and reading the information on consoles faster than any other RAM on the market to date. The RAM can handle bigger loads of data resulting in less loading time.
The PS5 is set to be released in the fall of 2020 close to the release of Microsoft’s Xbox Scarlett consoles. If Sony’s plan works out, console players may be near a future where loading screens are gone for good.
