So we have our first look at Sony "PS5" as well as the "PS5 Digital Edition". We also got a hands-on live video on the Sony PS5 "dual-sense controller". Which has a futuristic look to it. Furthermore, we got not only details about a ton of new games. But also on the Playstation 5 itself. We finally know what this console looks like. When you look at the Digital Edition compared to the standard PS5, it kind of has that tapered shape where you don't have the disc drive. Especially when you see it side by side with that DualSense controller, obviously this is much much smaller and realistically better looking console than the Series X. So we will take an in-depth look at this console and talk about its features. Let's talk!

Sony PS5-Features.

From this console, we can expect features like ray tracing, which was in almost every single game we saw. And we are assuming a lot of these games are also going to be taking advantage of some higher framerates. But the thing that jumped out to me is that there were, probably almost 20 different games that they showed in the Playstation launch event. And most of them were from very big franchises.

Some games like "Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart" did a very good job of showing off several new aspects of the PS5. Not only of course because of the ray tracing with the excellent looking lighting. Now what's impressive about all of these games is that they are running on real PS5 hardware. Yes, they're still in development phase, so there's some room for these titles to improve their performance and reliability on the PS5. They also showed off the speed of the SSD by taking advantage of the rift mechanic. Which will allow you to kind of wrap-around. And obviously, this was not possible on the PS4.

Sony PS5-Accessories.

So they did show off a few accessories, which includes a new 3D camera. But I think it's very interesting to think that Sony this time around, are really going first and foremost with a digital edition of the PS5. Yes, the Xbox has been doing this for a little while, with the Xbox One S All Digital, which was the lower end Xbox One that didn't have the disc drive that was a little bit cheaper. But this time around it seems like Sony's very much focusing on having a least $50 cheaper Playstation 5 Digital Edition if you're not going to be using the discs.

Now of course there are advantages to that disc drive beyond just the pure games. We do finally have support for 4K Blu-Ray, but I feel like the diskless version is probably gonna be the more popular one. However, it does depend on how much cheaper it is. Are we looking at a $550 PS5 and a $500 PS5 digital? We still don't know.

Throughout the entire event, Sony were teasing little bits and pieces of the PS5 experience. And we did get a little bit of a look at the startup animation. But that being said, there are a lot of things that we still have not seen with the PS5. Yes, we are excited, we finally got to see what this thing really looks like, but there's still a lot of questions and there's still a lot of things that we still need to find out about what this PS5 is really capable of.

We've also already seen some PS5 gameplay thanks to the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo. Now, as it's a tech demo, you always have to take this stuff with a grain of salt, this is meant to show off everything in the best possible light. But it's not always necessarily representative of what the final gameplay will look like. That being said though, the lighting in the games particularly looks impressive with the ray tracing.






PS5 Hardware & Specs.

So the specs we have known for a couple of months now. And if you're a PC gamer, you will be very familiar. So just like with the Playstation 4. Sony is taking advantage of a full AMD architecture. This time around it means that they are taking advantage of 8 core Zen 2 CPU, which on the Ryzen side has shaken up the gaming PC industry, so it's very nice to see this come over to the consoles. Performance-wise, we're expecting a major upgrade here, and it will enable a lot of new things, the current generation consoles had good graphics, but the processors were incredibly weak.

But then when you look at other aspects of a game such as the simulations, physics, the size of the sheer world and everything in it, it really was limited, I mean you could look at games like what Rockstar was able to take advantage of on the PS3 and 360 with GTA V compared to GTA V on the PS4. Realistically they didn't have that much better worlds, it was much more a graphic upgrade, however this time around thanks to the better CPU in the Sony PS5. We're going to see much much more detail worlds and a lot more. Because it straight up has the same level of CPU horsepower as a high-end gaming PC.

Now, of course, we can't talk about brand new consoles without talking about the graphics, and in this case, both the PS5 as well as Series X are taking advantage of AMD's RDNA 2.0 graphics. Now, this is pretty cutting edge stuff, and it's not even out in the PC space. Although it will likely be coming out around the time these consoles launch later this year.

There are a few major improvements. First of all, is the fact that it has a new architecture with better clock for clock performance. On top of that, it does have a lot of built-in new features such as of course ray tracing, which I think will become much more standard in the next few years with the consoles having it, with PCs pretty much having it across the board. Now Sony has also spent a lot of time working on its audio engine which is of course built into the GPU.



PS5 hardware 

Source: Sony

Display Compatibility.

So the Xbox Series X as well as the Playstation 5 both support 8K, so we could see higher resolution graphics. But I don't think that's going to happen though, instead, my thoughts are a lot of developers are going to focus much more on the framerate of their games. I wouldn't be surprised to see all this extra graphics horsepower, all the new sort of technology that's going into these consoles. Focusing less on resolution and more on framerate. 

I can see plenty of games taking advantage of 1080p or 1440p for the resolution, but cranking a full 120 FPS, especially in multiplayer. And I think on which feature Sony is going to sell these new consoles, what really makes this sort of worth upgrading over the PS4. It's going to be these experiences that we haven't previously been able to see.

Variable Clock Speed!

So we also got to know that the Playstation 5 has what is known as a variable clock speed for both its CPU and its graphics. Now, this is not a new concept. This variable clock speed is being on almost all devices from your mobile device to your laptops, etc. It will almost definitely boost to a high clock speed, however, it will do that by taking up a lot of power and then once either the power or the thermals catch up, it will then start to slow down just a little bit based on if you're really consuming that much power for a very long period of time.

However, I don't think that makes quite as much sense on a game console which is running very close to 100% at all times, so there have been a fair few rumors from developers that it is difficult to develop for the Playstation 5 because it does have a variable clock speed. To be clear I haven't used PS5 yet, I just heard rumors.

Now, this is not even something new for the PC space, some graphics cards will be able to boost a little bit higher. But generally speaking, it'll boost to a pretty consistent level of performance, and obviously, console games are hyper optimized to take the absolute best advantage of the hardware that they have. But what I see happening here is that while Sony has taken advantage of things like SmartShift, which is AMD's technology, to allow the CPU and GPU to work together.

It gives some additional ability for the console to give you more performance, but what it really seems like to me, is that Microsoft probably spent more money to get a bigger SOC which can just sit at high clock speed, period, pretty much no matter what. Whereas Sony has a little bit of a smaller chip, likely is gonna have a smaller console, which is an advantage, but to get to that point, there will be some limits to really push everything they could get out of the chip.

Even with the Sony PS5 event, we still don't know a lot about the Playstation 5. Something like its price. I think that we're going to see a little bit later. We know that the PS5 will support some number of PS4 games, this makes sense. Because it's going from an AMD X86 architecture to an upgraded version of that same architecture. So there's no reason why PS4 games won't work. They seem to say that most of the most popular games will be optimized first. Is there going to be a point where all PS4 games are playable on the PS5? is there going to be some way to know? I am very curious to see as well as what the process looks like. We will see if there's any older backward compatibility that Sony may add, either now or later in the future.

PS5-OS & Build.

Another thing I'm very curious about with the PS5 is what the software looks like. If you talk about Sony's Playstation OS and interface they have done a great job with software since PS3. I love the PS3 interface even to this day, I still feel like it's super intuitive, even though toward the end it got a little long and complicated. PS4 I think is also a pretty clean OS. My bigger question is what Sony's plan for the Sony PS5 really is? So with the PS3 it sort of struck this nice balance between obviously it was a very serious gaming machine but it had a lot of other very nice features. It had the Blu-Ray drive at that time. You had a freaking compact flash card slot on the first fat PS3.

I mean there was a lot of stuff that they were doing. But gaming was very much the focus, for the PS4, especially when you contrast that with the Xbox One, it was a gaming console first and foremost. With the Sony PS5, and considering that this is going to be the generation that's going to be living in our living rooms for the next coming years. I'm curious to see, are they going to push more of the entertainment aspect.

Sony PS5 Pre-Orders.

Pre-orders of the Playstation 5 will be happening soon as we got some official information from sony themselves in the interview yesterday with "jeff Kelley". They talked about pre-orders and how they won't surprise us. As there were some rumors that pre-orders were happening and the twitter lit up. But the actual story was somewhat different as it was some fake rumor which was spread all over social media. However, we still don't know how that happened and who did it.

However, Sony also accidentally dropped the PS5 for pre-order and all the people got excited. But it turned out that nothing they just put up a pre-order page but they didn't allow us to just kind of a hype page essentially. Anyways! What's good though is that there is a new report which stated that sony has increased the production of PS5 to 10 million by the end of 2020. Which is amazing news considering sony began PS5 mass production in June now this is really surprising. We didn't expect anything like this because of the current situation going in the world. We thought we may only end up seeing three to five million units but now we're seeing up to 10 million by the end of the year as reported by "Nikkei Asian Review" and "Bloomberg".

Is Sony going to take advantage of their huge collection to make this more of a computer powered system or make it more capable of being like much of a console-like they did in previous years? We don't know yet. Anyways! What are your thoughts on this next-gen gaming console "PS5"? And which gaming console are you currently using? Let me know in the comments!