Further speculation about the PS6 has been shared by notorious NeoGAF snoop KeplerL2, who’s hinted Sony may try to shave off costs by shipping the system with “just” 1TB of storage space and no disc drive. It could offer a bundle with the latter included, like it does with the current PS5.
The current PS5 Digital Edition has just 825GB of storage space, which can be expanded using a separately purchased NVMe SSD.
But the cost of memory has exploded over the past year or so, with prices more than doubling. Sony recently announced that it will stop supplying its roster of digital camera memory cards until the situation improves.
Hardware sneak KeplerL2 notes that reducing the amount of internally included storage is the “most obvious area” to cut costs.
But with file sizes ever increasing, could it come at the cost of usability?
The rumourmonger argues that if the next-gen console supports neural texture compression like expected, games could have a smaller footprint than they currently do on the PS5.
Neural texture compression is a type of technology developed by NVida and AMD designed to reduce VRAM requirements and file sizes using AI-driven neural networks.
It does sound like the kind of thing system architect Mark Cerny and his team would be experimenting with as part of Project Amethyst, especially at a time when the cost of memory has exploded. One solution to the problem may simply be to do more with less.
Obviously, this is all just insider scuttlebutt, and while KeplerL2 does have a fairly strong track record, we’re still sceptical of how intimately familiar he is with Sony’s internal plans.