Sony today spilled several details on the PlayStation 5, including its release timing.

First of all, yes, "PlayStation 5" is the name of Sony's next-gen console. The company also confirmed today that it's launching the PS5 during the holiday 2020 season. No pricing info has been revealed yet, though.

Inside the PS5 will be a CPU based on AMD's Ryzen series and a GPU based on AMD's Navi line. Sony has also confirmed to Wired that the PS5 will have ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware. Ray-tracing is a technique that helps improve complex lighting and sound effects.

Also packed inside the PS5 will be an SSD. Pat consoles have come equipped with spinning hard disk drives, so the upgrade to a solid state drive should help lead to faster loading times.

PlayStation 5 games will come on 100GB optical disks, which means that the PS5 will have an optical drive. You'll also be able to play 4K Bluray movies on the console. 

When you get a new game, you'll be required to perform a game installation onto the SSD. One interesting tidbit is that Sony says it'll offer a more configurable installation than it has in the past, giving you more control over what you install onto your console. So you could install just a game's multiplayer or single player portion, or install both but then delete the single player portion when you're done with it, clearing up space on your SSD for other content.

Sony also touched a bit on the new user interface that'll come with the PS5. You'll be able to see specific parts of a game like what single-player missions you can play and the rewards you'll get for them, or a set of activities you can join on multiplayer game servers. All of those options will be visible in the UI and you'll be able to jump into whatever you want.

And then there's the controller. A prototype used by Wired looked a lot like a PlayStation 4's Dual Shock 4 controller, but features a couple of notable upgrades over that old controller. The first are adaptive triggers, which are built into the L2 and R2 trigger buttons and allow developers to program resistance into them, giving you a more tactile sensation when doing things like drawing a bow or accelerating a car in an off-road environment.

Another major upgrade to the PS5's controller is haptic feedback. This is replacing the rumble feedback found in past PlayStation controllers, and it's meant to help give you a broader range of feedback when you're performing various actions. When testing the prototype controller in some demos, Wired found that the haptic feedback helped to give "distinct — and surprisingly immersive — tactile experiences."