PS6 to reportedly ship with a 1TB SSD, will use AI to reduce game sizes

In a follow-up to our report from yesterday, where known insider and hardware leaker KeplerL2 took to the NeoGAF forums to confirm that the BOM (Bill of Materials) for the upcoming PlayStation 6 will cost Sony around $760 USD per console, we've got a few more notable PS6 details to share. This arrives via a few follow-up posts from KeplerL2, which claim that the $760 figure is based on the PS6 launching with 1TB of internal storage and no disc drive.

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Per previous leaks, it was expected that Sony would upgrade the storage on the PlayStation 6 console to PCIe Gen5 SSD technology, with each console shipping with 2TB of internal storage. With current plans for the PS6 pointing to 1TB of internal storage, this represents an obvious cost-cutting measure alongside removing the disc drive as standard and releasing it as an optional add-on.

However, according to KeplerL2, Sony is reducing storage capacity from 2TB to 1TB because the PS6 will natively support neural texture compression, which should result in significantly smaller game sizes (in GBs) compared to the current PS5. According to early tests on PCs using similar technology, neural texture compression can also significantly reduce VRAM requirements, freeing up space for features like ray tracing and path tracing.

As for the impact neural texture compression could have on a 100GB game, it could theoretically reduce it to 50GB. So, cutting the PS6's storage capacity in half to save on costs makes sense, with Sony also investing in other technologies to reduce game installation sizes. One recent patent involves data streaming, in which certain in-game assets are downloaded and stored in memory while the core game data runs on the console. It's a sort of cloud-hybrid approach that maintains low latency, using the cloud only for things like textures and other assets.

However, even with neural texture compression, with a portion of PS6 gamers bringing their PS4 and PS5 libraries to the next-gen console, odds are the 1TB of storage will still fill up fairly quickly. Still, it'll be interesting to see how neural texture compression technology pans out, as tests of NVIDIA's AI-powered texture compression show it can deliver a massive 8X reduction in storage or memory requirements.