Sony Figured Out How to Make PS4 Games Load Much Faster
By One of the major selling points of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X is an end to game loading times thanks to their use of very fast SSD storage. However, PS4 game load times are being improved or even removed completely with a patch it seems.
As VGC reports, although there’s been no official confirmation from Sony yet, a number of first-party PS4 games are being patched and loading considerably faster afterwards. For example, The Last of Us Remastered typically takes well over a minute to load, but with this new patch applied the load time is reduced to less than 14 seconds.
The video below, discovered by Eurogamer, demonstrates the difference in load times:
Other games thought to see improvements so far include God of War, God of War 3, and Until Dawn, which apparently doesn’t even need a loading screen anymore. This is demonstrated in a video tweeted by VDZE Media game review Craig, who suggests the technology must also be used for Ghost of Tsushima.
There’s speculation the load time reductions are due to the use of new data compression techniques, but the patch enabling the faster loading is just marked as fixing bugs. Did Sony instead just find a bug in its data loading process on the console? Whatever the cause, it’s a welcome one for PS4 owners. Hopefully Sony explains what’s changed soon and when we can expect the patches for these (and many more?) games to roll out.
