Price, Release date, Design, Games, Controller

After months of hints and minor revelations, Sony’s PS5 is finally in full view of the public. The company unveiled its next-gen console in a game-focused live stream the other week, highlighting some of the exclusive, multi-platform games coming to the new machine. We were also able to see the box for the first time, something Microsoft did with its Xbox Series X in January. Between that and the previous revelations, we have a fair amount of information on the subject right now, so let’s get a summary of everything we know so far, as well as predictions about what we don’t know. So here is the PS5: it’s design, specs, and games, as well as price and release date predictions.

Design: Is rare! The consoles have been black boxes or made by Nintendo for as long as I can remember, but the PS4 is looking for some kind of mod spaceship look, with large white plastic fins on the side. There are two versions: one with a protruding disk drive and one without it. Both are gigantic and probably the largest console you’ve ever had.

Take a look here:

Release date: A question mark, although not as great as the price. Consoles generally come out in November in preparation for the holiday season: PS4 came out on November 15 and PS3 came out on November 17 (in North America). Before that, things weren’t that standardized, but nobody really expects things to change that much. Look for something in late November, maybe 19 or 20.

Specs: Sony revealed the specifications of the console before it showed the machine itself, so we know what’s inside the box:

• CPU: AMD Zen 2-based CPU with 8 cores at 3.5GHz (variable frequency)
• GPU: 10.28 TFLOPs, 36 CUs at 2.23GHz (variable frequency)
• GPU architecture: RDNA custom 2
• Memory interface: 16 GB GDDR6 / 256 bit
• Memory bandwidth: 448GB / s
• Internal storage: 825GB custom SSD
• IO performance: 5.5 GB / s (raw), typical 8-9 GB / s (compressed)
• Expandable storage: NVMe SSD slot
• External storage: Support USB HDD (PS4 games only)
• Optical unit: 4K UHD Blu-ray drive

Games: This is a bit confusing, because the PS5 will be backward compatible, and there are plenty of games between generations that will also receive updates for newer hardware. So not only will everything you have on PS4 run on PS5, but major AAA releases like Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Cyberpunk 2077 And whatever the new Call of Duty is it will be done to harness more horsepower.

Beyond that, Sony announced a ton of exclusive and non-exclusive titles in its recent storefront. Here is a list of those. We’re not getting a first-party AAA launch title, but we’re getting Spider-Man: Miles Morales a smaller stand-alone title to be released for the holiday season. The first large-scale exclusive will be Horizon: Forbidden West, in 2021, although we don’t know when.

Controller: In fact, we saw the Dualsense controller long before the console itself, and the two-tone white / black design certainly makes more sense in context. That is what we can see, however. What’s more exciting is what we can’t see yet: The Dualsense comes with state-of-the-art haptics and feedback mechanisms. I don’t want to get too excited, because it’s impossible to evaluate these things without a controller in hand, and the rumbling effects have been overrated before. However, I have read the impressions of the developers who are impressed with the overall experience, so I am cautiously optimistic.

Price: This is possibly the biggest question on the entire console. We don’t have a confirmed price yet, but we have an idea where it could fall. What we know is that there will be only one but two prices: one for the fully digital edition and the other for the disk drive edition. If the all-digital edition is cheaper, most suspect a price differential of $ 50- $ 100. $ 100 would be much more than the cost of the disk drive, but there is always a chance that Sony may hope to make up for it by committing players to buy on PSN.

Few expect the price to hit $ 599, the dazzling price that brought the PS3 to a standstill at launch, but it’s not entirely impossible. If that’s the upper limit, the lower limit is probably $ 399, which is where the PS4 was released.

Most expect one of these two machines to be $ 499, so the breakdown could be $ 549 / $ 499 or $ 499 / $ 449. If we’re looking at a $ 50 price differential, I guess it would be one of those two.

If we are seeing a price differential of $ 100, it is not impossible that we start to rise in one of those two limits: $ 599 / $ 499 or $ 499 / $ 399.