5 Things About The Upcoming Playstation 5

Written by Cheryl Tan

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Credit: Sony

With Sony skipping this year’s E3 show, Microsoft took that chance to announce details about their upcoming Xbox console, nicknamed Project Scarlett, while Playstation fans were kept waiting eagerly for Sony’s next console. Well, Sony has finally come out with more details that only serve to make us even more excited. Here are the five things you should be hyped for.

1. No more HDDs

Pictured: Leaked PS5 Development Kit Credit: LetsGoDigital

That’s right, Sony will be transitioning away from the traditional spinning hard drives and using solid-state drives (SSD) for the new Playstation 5 (PS5). This greatly improves load times and will also improve efficiency with regards to storage, allowing for developers to decrease the size of their games and patches.

The only issue I can see here is that Sony will most likely be using lower capacity SSDs in the PS5 to keep costs down, so the need to upgrade the SSD to a higher capacity one might be something to consider.

2. Game Installation

For physical disk collectors, you’ll be pleased to know that Sony isn’t planning on going all-digital just yet. There will still be an optical drive for the 100GB optical disks that physical games will use, and that drive will also double up as a 4K Blu-ray reader.

But what’s even more exciting is the fact that game installations will be configurable. Thanks to the use of the SSD to store data, Sony is allowing “finer-grained access to the data”, according to System Architect Mark Cerny.

That means fans of single-player campaigns might be able to opt for just the campaign and leave out installing the multiplayer parts which they have no interest in. It could possibly be a good way of managing the storage available, which could be a bit limited.

3. Ray-tracing technology

Back when Sony announced that their upcoming console would support ray-tracing, many people were worried that it would be a software-based trick. Now, Sony has confirmed that ray-tracing acceleration is present in the GPU hardware, which is based off AMD’s Navi graphics cards.

This means even more realistic scene lighting, thanks to light in the game behaving as it would in real life.

4. All new controllers

In the most recent blog post by Sony, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s President & CEO Jim Ryan details the two key innovations in the new controller that will ship with the PS5.

The new controller removes the rumble feedback that was present in the DualShock 4 controller and uses an all-new haptic feedback system that is claimed to even be able to let players feel the difference between running through a field and trekking through mud.

It sounds quite similar to Nintendo’s HD Rumble in their Joy-Con controllers, which has some of the best feedback in my opinion, so I’m extremely excited about this.

The triggers have also been changed, and are now called “adaptive triggers”, allowing for different resistance settings to simulate pulling the string on a bow or accelerating a vehicle on rocky terrain.

5. Launch date

Of course, the launch date and pricing are the most important. Unfortunately, it’s still a long way out for any prices to be announced, but we do have an estimated date of “Holiday 2020”.

The PS4 was launched mid-November in the US before making its way to Asia back then, and it seems that the PS5 will be following a similar release timeline.