I was concerned that such a rich level of functionality may well be taking system resources away from the game developer, whether that's in terms of CPU time, GPU or memory. Sony isn't giving away any numbers on what the system allocation is, and neither is it confirming how much useable space is available on the SSD. However, the aim is to deliver the new features with the same kind of system allocation developers currently work with on current-gen platforms.
"Hardware resource is limited and defined, and it's shared between the game and our system side," confirms Hideaki Nishino. "We define how much of the resource can be spent by the system side, but it's a similar amount [to] what we are doing with PlayStation 4. That's a philosophical thing: we are trying to give as much power and resource as possible back to the game side, because the game is the core, and then we bring Control Centre and Activity Cards while minimising the [system] resources we spend."