We’ve finally been given a look at the next gen offering from Sony as the Playstation 5 reveal event gave fans plenty of details – but how are the specs shaping up to the competition and how will the change impact the gaming industry as a whole? There’s plenty of good news to be had, but given how quickly the market is changing this could be perhaps the last chance for Sony and Microsoft to operate in the market as it currently is.
The gaming market has already changed heavily over the past few years, mobile gaming now dominates with over 50% of all gaming done on the mobile platform – there have been challenges, the introduction of an initiative called Gamstop within the UK for example is a sign of where the strength has been shown, it was made mandatory for operators within the country to register or risk losing their gaming license but this list shows the services that are able to operate outside of that restriction – but can the next gen consoles make strides into tapping this market?
As expected it will launch with a sizable SSD – 825GB internal, a little smaller than the drive offered by Microsoft, but the storage architecture will no doubt be greatly improved, there’s also an available NVMe SSD slot with the potential for a USB HDD external drive for older device games. For those who haven’t experienced SSD performance, the leap is bigger than just faster load – there are a number of other optimisations in both the drive architecture and the way in which developers can avoid previous limitations in the hardware.
The CPU and GPU as expected are also custom built specifically for the device with backwards compatibility in mind – the jump in performance for core speed is effectively doubled but the change is more than just that as further optimizations increase performance here. Given how far hardware is stretched on previous devices, with the last gen consoles lasting over a decade and holding up remarkably well, these devices will have the hardware needed to perform just as well for just as long.
The highlight of the system was found in the first big name game to release with the console in the Horizon Zero Dawn sequel, the first title had become well known for how far it had pushed tech on the Playstation 4 with a method of world generation that allowed for a huge open world without impacting performance, combine this with the backwards compatibility toward games on the previous consoles, the library of what will be available on launch without the other releases is already looking very impressive. The console is slated for ‘holiday season’ of this year, expected for around Christmas time much like Microsoft and its new Xbox offering, as such the next gen consoles are right on our doorstep with expectations already set high, the press events have done enough to meet them and get us ready for an exciting decade in console releases moving forward.
