Zen has the potential for a crap tonne of PCI-E lanes (whether this is incorporated into the console design remains to be seen though). NVME uses 4 lanes on PC's, can't see a reason Sony couldn't design around 8 lanes (Literally overkill tho!). Technically, you theoretically exceed what PC's can do. But whether you realistically exceed it is another thing entirely.
As seen with PC's, going from SSD's maxing SATA3 to PCI-E 4x isn't as big as going from mechanical HDD not maxing SATA 3 to SSD maxing SATA 3.
So i think the 'revelation' might be more pricing than performance as NVME drives are expensive as balls.
To touch on what i said about the Ray tracing though - and this stems from the "3D audio" part - there is a chance Sony will have some dedicated circuitry that can help accelerate some stages of Ray tracing - in addition to brute force compute (AMD has always had a compute advantage).
They started this stuff with TLoU iirc, where they'd cast rays from audio sources and test how occluded the sound was from the player - so sound through a wall would sound muffled. If you had the circuitry on the chip, it wouldn't inherently go wasted, as it does on RTX where no raytracing means a large section of the chip is idle. If all you are doing is testing for intersections, you could have this circuity pull double duty (and accelerate one of the slowest parts of Ray tracing) for the renderer.
Interesting to see what the GPU is going to look like!
On a different note however, i don't know if this is the way Sony intend to reveal this stuff going forward. But i wonder if they might have jumped the gun if the intent is some sort of larger appeal to audiences?
Maybe, looking at what AMD had on offer, the notion that the PS5 and Nextbox are going to be nigh on identical made them try to go this route to appear as the more 'premium' option to people outside gaming; Gamers are going to know whats up whether they go to E3, or not, so there's no real loss there.
It's all well and fine for Samsung, Huawei, Apple etc. to get magazine/press time, but they're phones, everyone and their mother has one, and/or uses one.
. No way this can be $400.
