The PlayStation 5 Has Finally Been Revealed

Sony’s next-generation gaming console has finally been revealed – say hello to the PlayStation 5. 

It’s been seven years since the PS4 hit store shelves. It’s been a tumultuous period of gaming, rife with progress in the virtual reality arena, but not without controversies – loot boxes and, of late, surging file sizes and updates.

Microsoft’s next console was shown off to the public months ago, with Sony waiting patiently, dropping tidbits about specifications and controllers. Now, we’ve got a look at the actual PS5 itself – and it’s an absolute beauty. However, we still don’t know how much it’ll cost.

Its design obviously speaks to that of the DualSense controllers, the next evolution from Sony’s long-standing DualShock run of pads across the previous PlayStations. Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, earlier said it captures the ‘generational leap’ being made with the new console.

The PS5 is set to be beast, loading games 100 times faster than its predecessor. The console’s custom SSD drive – meaning it’s expandable via an external hard drive, although compatible ones will likely be pricey – is set to pack 825GB, running at 5.5GB per second in raw mode or 8-9GB per second in compressed.

Prepare for ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it’ load times and say goodbye to those god-awful, tedious transition screens. For example, the PS4 took 20 seconds to load 1GB of data, whereas the PS5 can load double that in a quarter of a second.

While its Microsoft counterpart, the Xbox Series X, has a larger SSD at 1TB, the PS5 is significantly faster – in this regard, it’ll allow for ‘instantaneous’ fast-travelling in open-world games, for example.

The PS5 is also equipped with 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz (variable frequency) and a custom-made AMD GPU coming in at 10.28 teraflops and 36 compute units clocked at 2.23GHz. This is less than the Xbox Series X, which has a ginormous 12 teraflops and 52 compute units at 1.825GHz.

Based on our discussions with developers, we concluded that the sense of touch within gameplay, much like audio, hasn’t been a big focus for many games. We had a great opportunity with PS5 to innovate by offering game creators the ability to explore how they can heighten that feeling of immersion through our new controller.

This is why we adopted haptic feedback, which adds a variety of powerful sensations you’ll feel when you play, such as the slow grittiness of driving a car through mud. We also incorporated adaptive triggers into the L2 and R2 buttons of DualSense so you can truly feel the tension of your actions, like when drawing a bow to shoot an arrow.

In addition to haptic feedback and adaptive triggers, there’s stronger battery life, less weight, ‘subtle updates to the grip’, a new ‘Create’ button (essentially the same function as the previous Share button) and a built-in microphone array (there’s still a headphone jack for headsets).

The PlayStation 5 will be available to buy this Christmas, with its price yet to be announced.