tendance
when can you preorder the ps5
So we have just gotten our first look at the ps5
as well as the Playstation 5 Digital Edition, and that is
how you do a launch event.
With millions of people watching the live event across
YouTube and Twitch, 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, and I gotta
say, it looks like, to me, it looks like one of those concepts
that we’ve seen forever with all the white plastic and sorta
that interesting shape, especially when you look at the Digital
Edition compared to the standard PS5, where it kinda has
that tapered shape where you don’t have the disc drive.
Super interesting though, and especially when you see it
side by side with that DualSense controller, obviously this
is going to be a much, much smaller and realistically better
looking console than the Series X.
Now obviously games were first and foremost today
at the event, although of course, we did only see them
at 1080p 30, which is fine but not really showing off
the best of the console,
however, it was very clear that a lot of these games
were a cut above anything that you can see on the PS4.
So things like ray tracing were in almost every single
a game we saw, I’m assuming a lot of these games are also
going to be taking advantage of some higher framerates.
But the thing that really jumped out to me is that unlike
the Xbox event from last month, Sony came out swinging,
there were, by my count probably almost 20 different
games that they showed and a lot of them were from
very big franchises, we got Gran Turismo 7, we got a
brand new Resident Evil game we got a ton of newer
IPs which is always nice to see at the beginning of a
console generation, there was just so much for pretty
much anyone on this one.
Why are there two?
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, did you
see ray tracing with the excellent looking lighting
but they also showed off the speed of the SSD
by taking advantage of that rift mechanic, which
will allow you to kinda warp around, and obviously
that would not be something that would be possible
on something like the PS4.
Something else that looked great is Kena: Bridge of
Spirits, which when I first saw it, straight up looked like
a Pixar movie from just a few years ago.
Now what’s impressive about all of these games
is that they are running on real PS5 hardware.
Now mind you, they’re still development kits,
so there’s some room, some wiggle room I guess,
but what I really appreciate here is that we didn’t
just see a lot of trailers, we saw a few trailers but
pretty much everything was running in-engine on
the consoles and a lot of what we saw today was
actual real gameplay which I think bodes well.
So they did show off a fair few accessories,
including 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.
Obviously 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, that was a little bit
of a weird console, but this time around it seems
like Sony’s very much focusing on having what I
assume is at least a $50 cheaper Playstation 5
Digital Edition if you’re not going to be using
the discs, and let’s be sort of real here,
how many people are actually going to buy PS5
discs, especially considering that these games are
like 100 gigabytes, right.
Are you actually gonna buy the discs?
to that disc drive beyond just the pure games.
We do finally have support for 4K Blu-Ray, but
realistically I feel like the diskless version is
probably gonna be the more popular one, but
it does depend on how much cheaper it is.
Are we looking at a $550 Playstation 5
and a $500 PS5, we still don’t know.
At least people on Twitter very much seem
to be onboard with the PS5, I am pretty firmly
in the camp of “I like it”, it looks different, it looks
unique, but it does definitely move forward
from the PS4, which I was never really a big
fan of the particular design of, and while
the Series X is obviously a very powerful
console with a lot of sort of hardware specs,
ultimately it is a big black box, so you know.
Throughout the entire event, Sony was 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.
Obviously, I am very excited, we finally got to see
what this thing really looks like, but ultimately,
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.
Of course, we’ve already seen some Playstation
5 gameplay thanks to the Unreal Engine 5 tech
demo.
ps5 games
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, pun intended,
but it’s not always necessarily representative of what
the final gameplay will look like.
That being said though, it is clear that these new
consoles have a lot of very fun toys to play with.
The lighting particularly looks really impressive
with the ray tracing, and obviously those ridiculous
textures that UE5 supports while they will absolutely
destroy your 825 gigabytes little PS5 SSD, are really
really cool to see.
The only downside here is that this was really was
framed as a PS5 thing, and while yes, this demo is
running in realtime on PS5 dev hardware, there is
absolutely nothing to say that this cannot and would
not run on the Xbox Series X.
So the specs have been 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 Zen 2 CPU cores, which on the Ryzen
side really 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 jump here,
and it will enable a lot of new things, so the current
generation consoles had good graphics, but the processors
were incredibly weak, which really sort of hamstrung sort
of, certain things would look really good, but then when
you look at other aspects of a game such as the simulations,
such as physics, such as the size of the sheer world
and everything in 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 and the Xbox One, realistically they didn’t have
the PS5
that much better worlds, it was much more a graphic
upgrade, however this time around because of this
better CPU, we’re going to see much much more detail
worlds and a lot more in that sort of simulation space,
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, 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, but there
are a few major improvements.
First of all, is the fact that it is a new architecture with
better clock for clock performance, so you can look at
all like the teraflop numbers and stuff but that’s not
directly equivalent to last generation consoles.
On top of that, it does have a lot of built-in new features
such as of course ray tracing, which will really I think
become a much more standard thing going into the new
few years with the consoles having it, with PCs pretty
much having it across the board, and Sony spent a lot
of time working on their audio engine which is of course
built into the GPU, but beyond that, what my sort of real
takeaway here is is that while yes, we will have games
that look better, right, we’ll have games that have better
lighting, which will be a major advantage, will have
more detailed textures, all that kind of stuff, right,
that stuff that is coming in this generation full stop.
But instead, my thought is that they’re going to focus
on the actual fidelity of the experience.
the new sorta technology
So the Xbox Series X as well as the Playstation 5
both support 8K, we could see higher resolution stuff,
I don’t think that’s going to happen though, instead my
thought is a lot of developers are going to focus much
more on the framerate of their games, so you look at
this generation which is very much overwhelmed with
30 FPS titles, that’s fine if you’re playing some simple
story based game or, that’s okay but, when you get your
controller in your hand and you have like a 120 hertz
panel in front of you and you’re playing that new Call of
Duty, that’s a real upgrade in the experience, right, I mean,
this is something that the PC space has been pioneering
for quite a while, so I wouldn’t be surprised one bit to see
all this extra graphics horsepower, all the new CPU, all
the new sorta 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 their multiplayer modes, and when I think
about what’s gonna sell these new consoles, what really
makes this sort of worth upgrading over your Xbox One
or your PS4 or your Wii U or your Switch or whatever
the case is, it’s going to be these experiences that we
haven’t previously been able to see.
Are you gonna want to play your 30 FPS game when
your friend with the PS5 is playing at 120 FPS, I don’t
think so.
graphics cards
Well, if your friend’s bragging about his framerate
though, he probably sounds annoying so we 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, right, especially when
you look at mobile devices, that is completely standard,
right, your phone and your laptop, whatever the case is,
will almost definitely boost to really 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 cranking it for a very long period
of time.
For a mobile device, that makes perfect sense,
you’re opening up a web page, you boost up to
100, you have really high clock speed, the web
page is done loading and it comes back down, right,
that makes complete sense, however what doesn’t
make sense is when you take advantage of that same
principle at least in theory, mind you, I haven’t spent time
with the PS5 yet, just sort of heard rumors, but
generally speaking, I don’t think that makes quite as
much sense on a game console which is generally
speaking 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, right.
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
AMD’s
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, to really push everything they could out of
the chip, they’re having to really crank it up to 11,
and there are definitely gonna be some limits
where it’s gonna be like (makes booping sounds
with the mouth) and obviously you’re gonna have
performance differences, did I just make the noise,
I accidentally made the noise when I was like (makes
booping sounds with mouth)
Even with today’s event, we still don’t know a lot
about the Playstation 5, so something like the price
I think, is something that Sony and Microsoft
are gonna play chicken to see who can reveal last
who knows if there’s even some wiggle room
on what they’re actually gonna price these things at,
that’s something 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, it’s going from an
AMD X86 architecture to an upgraded version of that
same architecture, there’s no reason why PS4 games
won’t work, short of obviously making sure that they’ve
been tested and there’s the back compatible sort of
layer available, but what we don’t know is what that
actually looks like.
More games
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, do you have
to Google it, or do you put your PS4 disc in and find
out, that I am very curious to see as well as what
the process looks like.
If the Playstation 5 needs to download a patch, if you
need to wait for OS updates to sort of better support
more games, I’m really curious about that, I’m also
curious if there’s any older backward compatibility
that Sony may add, either now or later in the future.
Another thing I’m very curious about with the PS5
is what the software looks like.
So Sony’s 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, but sort of my
bigger question is not necessarily just what the design
will be, but more so what Sony’s plan for the 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,
right, obviously it had the Blu-Ray drive, you later on
in the generation had like Netflix and all those sorts
of the streaming video, I mean, you had a freaking
compact flash card slot on the first fat PS3, right, 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, right,
yes you could still watch YouTube and Netflix,
the hardcore gamers?
yes you could still watch a Blu-Ray, but with
the Playstation 5, and considering that this is
going to be the generation that’s going to be
living in our living rooms for the next potentially
decade, I’m curious to see, are they going to push
more of the entertainment aspect, I mean I expect
all of the usual suspects of Disney+ and HBO Now
and all this kind of stuff will be on the PS5, but are
they going to do anything else beyond just cater to
Is Sony going to take advantage of their massive
libraries to try to make this more of a computer or
make it more capable of being like your all in one
entertainment system, or are they going to stick
with what they know, what they feel comfortable
with, which is making a games console first, and
everything else second.
I don’t know, I would guess that that’s probably
the answer, but there’s still a lot of things that we
really do not know about the PS5 until Sony decides
to drop five more events on us or just release the thing.
I mean, I would prefer they release the thing
