Never-before-seen details about Sony’s process of bringing PS5 game streaming service from the cloud.
According to Insider Gaming, earlier this week, the beta version of the PS5’s cloud game streaming feature was officially launched to some users. Aside from the notable detail of being able to play games over the Internet but being able to achieve 4K graphics quality, Sony doesn’t go into too many details about the feature. But some Insider Gaming sources recently shared more interesting details about the company’s new feature.
Accordingly, previously in development, the feature was internally named ‘Project Cronos’, with the goal to build a powerful PS5 game show experience thanks to the all-new streaming architecture. The project is said to be an important step in Sony’s growth in the ever-growing cloud gaming market
‘Project Cronos’ was launched 5 years ago, stemming from the complexity surrounding the PlayStation 5 SSD problem. Although SSDs are very fast, it created a new challenge that made Sony not can develop the infrastructure the company wants with this technology (related to functionality, latency, etc.). This prompted Sony to design a completely new network storage solution based on PCIe (NTB) and the PS5’s I/O coprocessor.
After research, the company came up with a custom storage server codenamed ‘Kura’, with read speeds up to 5GB/s and latency of less than 1ms. Sources say Sony will have a total of 28 data servers across 15 major cities to roll out the cloud game streaming service for PS5 and plans to launch the feature fully in fiscal 2023. (April 2023 – March 2024).
As recently as June, on the official PlayStation blog, the company said that it is testing cloud streaming capabilities for supported PS5 games under the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog and Game Trials categories, even digital PS5 titles that players own. But the feature is only available with the PlayStation Plus Premium paid membership level.