PS5 Won't Have the Long Install Times the PS4 Has

During today's Road to PS5 presentation, Sony PlayStation chief architect Mark Cerny revealed some of the big changes coming to the next-gen consoles, including the switch to SSDs which among other things, will eliminate the long game installs that exist as it does today on PS4. An early portion of Cerny's PS5 tech talk revolves around the switch to SSDs, which he says will promise much faster performance on the next-gen consoles. One area in which this will become noticeable is installing new games or patches. Currently, when a PS4 game downloads a patch onto the HDD, the console will take a long time to install the patch. This is because a brand new file has to be created each time a new patch is downloaded, or else the game will add a new seek and create performance problems later on. A game with numerous patches on the PS4 will sometimes exhibit performance issues because of added Seek time, or the measure of time it takes for a computer to find a piece of data on a hard drive. "With an SSD though, no seeks. So no need to make brand-new files with the changes incorporated. Which means no installs as you know them today," Cerny revealed. With the speed Cerny is promising with the PS5 thanks to an SSD, games will load faster, developers will have more maneuverability and space to design bigger games, and thankfully, there will be fewer install times. Check out the full PS5 specs here. Developing... [poilib element="accentDivider"] Matt Kim is a reporter for IGN.