Sony Teases PlayStation 5 Design
by Andrei Frumusanu on June 11, 2020 5:45 PM EST
Today during Sony’s “The Future of Gaming” show where the company and its partners revealed a slew of next-generation game titles, we also had a first glimpse of the physical design of the new PlayStation 5.
The new console is a significant departure for Sony’s console hardware which has retained a standard black design aesthetic ever since the PlayStation 2 (Although different colour scheme variants have been available). The new PlayStation 5 immediately stands out with its white-black design, as well for the fact that Sony is seemingly presenting the new console in a primarily vertical standing position.
The looks of the console are defined by an enveloping white rounded body that envelops a central glossy black middle section like some sort of cape. The black middle section at the top emits a blue light, illuminating the white side panels as well as the ventilation grills.
Today’s teaser showcased the first time what the console’s cooling hardware might look like. The new design looks to have ventilation grills throughout the whole top of the console as well as the top half of the front of the device, curving along the top corner of the design, with the grills present on both lateral sides. We don’t know if this is an exhaust or intake, or maybe even both, as we haven’t yet seen the back side of the new unit.
Sony’s presentation only showed the console in an upright position, so the design was possibly designed to be used like this in its most optimal fashion.
Another hint that the console might not be designed to be used in a horizontal position is the odd “hump” that appears where the BluRay disc drive is located. It’s a pretty unusual asymmetric design choice that inarguably will spark a lot of discussions.
Edit: Sony also showcasd the console in a horizontal position for a split second in the outro section of the show. It looks like the console is sitting on the "foot" that's depicted in the vertical position shots. This explains why the two feet look different in the previous picture - they both serve as the stands for the console in vertical and horizontal positions, with the odd shape of the foot designed to cup the round side of the console in the horizontal position, with the Digital Edition console having a different curve to it.
Sony is also announcing a Digital Edition of the PlayStation 5 which doesn’t feature a disc drive, getting rid of the hump in the design. Digital distribution has gained a ton of popularity of the last few years and Sony now releasing a digital only console certainly points out that the company envisions this trend to continue and grow.
Both console variants feature a minimalistic front – we only find a single USB-A port and a single USB-C port, alongside a power button, and for the regular version the disc eject button.
Alongside the two new PS5 variants, Sony also announced several new accessories for the console: The new DualSense controller which we’ve known for some time now, a new DualSense charging station which charges up to two controllers at a time, a stereoscopic HD camera, a media remote, and a new headset dubbed the PULSE 3D Wireless Headset.
3D audio is meant to be a big part of the new PlayStation 5 experience thanks to the console’s new audio hardware capabilities – so Sony releasing a first-party headset tied in with the console release isn’t too big of a surprise.
The Sony PlayStation 5 is scheduled to be launched this holiday season at a yet undisclosed price. It is powered by a custom AMD SoC employing 8 Zen 2 cores up to 3.5GHz, a new customised RDNA 2-based GPU with 36 CUs and up to 2.23GHz frequency, and a new ultra-fast SSD and storage architecture that is said to be multiple times faster than the best PC storage devices on the market.
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eddman - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
"With the PS4, Sony had a small advantage over MS by using mostly native code, whilst the Xbox One was using an outdated software version of DirectX API."What are you basing this on? Xbox's Directx suite is not exactly the same as what you get on PC. Game devs have always been able to write low-level, native code on xbox, starting with the original xbox.
P.S. XSX
Kangal - Thursday, June 18, 2020 - link
Here you go:Digital Foundry: DirectX 11 vs GNMX vs GNM - what's your take on the strengths and weakness of the APIs available to developers with Xbox One and PlayStation 4? Closer to launch there were some complaints about XO driver performance and CPU overhead on GNMX.
A Way Out dev's next game is "emotional" co-op action adventure platformer It Takes Two
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Oles Shishkovstov: Let's put it that way - we have seen scenarios where a single CPU core was fully loaded just by issuing draw-calls on Xbox One (and that's surely on the 'mono' driver with several fast-path calls utilised). Then, the same scenario on PS4, it was actually difficult to find those draw-calls in the profile graphs, because they are using almost no time and are barely visible as a result.
In general - I don't really get why they choose DX11 as a starting point for the console. It's a console! Why care about some legacy stuff at all? On PS4, most GPU commands are just a few DWORDs written into the command buffer, let's say just a few CPU clock cycles. On Xbox One it easily could be one million times slower because of all the bookkeeping the API does.
But Microsoft is not sleeping, really. Each XDK that has been released both before and after the Xbox One launch has brought faster and faster draw-calls to the table. They added tons of features just to work around limitations of the DX11 API model. They even made a DX12/GNM style do-it-yourself API available - although we didn't ship with it on Redux due to time constraints.
eddman - Sunday, June 21, 2020 - link
In that article it also says:"Did you know that Microsoft now allows developers to bypass DX11 and talk to the hardware directly in the similar manner to Sony's GNM API? "
You also commented the part that says: "They even made a DX12/GNM style do-it-yourself API available - although we didn't ship with it on Redux due to time constraints."
That article is from August 2014, so low-level coding has been available on X1 for many years now.
Also, the vanilla DX12 is already low-level; before the Ultimate variant.
P.S. I was under the impression that X1's directx had low-level access since day-one, like previous xboxes, but apparently it wasn't the case. It seems it was very similar to DX11 on windows. On the plus side, they added low-level access very quickly; in a year or so, it seems.
dontlistentome - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
I'd not read too much into the SSD specs - these are theoretical. Having owned many generations of (mostly) high-end consumer SSDs, the reality will be a consistent 7-800MB/s (none of this multu-gigabit nonsense) for bigger assets and 2-300MB/s for smaller stuff. Still 20-30 times that of the currentl HDDs. The difference between XB an PS5 will be affected far more by how old the devices are and what else is on them. I'd wager there will be no discernable difference in day to day use.Oxford Guy - Thursday, June 11, 2020 - link
"Sony Teases PlayStation 5 Design"Not even its parent company could resist teasing it over being slower than the upcoming XBox?
"PC-like"
It's not PC-like. "Consoles" have been PCs since the switch to Jaguar. They're merely straight-jacketed by software walled gardens to justify their existence.
For consumers, having a unified PC gaming platform, with Vulkan and OpenGL as the software basis and Linux as the OS, makes the most sense. Of course, sense doesn't translate into artificially-inflated levels of profit for certain companies (MS, Sony) at everyone else's expense.
brucethemoose - Thursday, June 11, 2020 - link
Theres something to be said for hardware consistency.Just look at the Switch... you don't see devs backporting AAAs to, say, the significantly faster GT 740.
Dizoja86 - Thursday, June 11, 2020 - link
And my Switch definitely gets more playtime than my gaming PC. Console developers have always done great work making beautiful games despite console hardware not being up to par with high-end PC's. Too many developers on PC try to brute-force good graphics rather than having half-decent art direction.nathanddrews - Thursday, June 11, 2020 - link
The number of PC games with "half-decent art direction" eclipse the total number of console exclusives - good and bad - in their entirety. There are so many PC games that are playable today from any point over the last 40 years. It's not even a fair comparison.With the nonstop trend of retro-looking games, I would argue that there are too many PC games that do NOT even attempt to have "good graphics".
0ldman79 - Friday, June 12, 2020 - link
Gotta agree with that one.Consoles, we beg for backwards compatibility so we can put the old console away and still play the games.
I still have Warcraft 2 and Unreal Tournament installed on my machines today. Literally have games that are 26 years old installed so I can play them whenever I want.
Can't do that with a console.
I do agree with the original statement tho about game creators trying to brute force everything. There was a time when they created good games that ran on everything. The last couple of years it seems that the goal is to make a $1,200 GPU and a $700 CPU seem like garbage so they can brag about how intense the game is.
Crysis may have started that but you could set everything on low and play it on a pretty potato system.
olafgarten - Friday, June 12, 2020 - link
What I don't understand is why recent games are 100gb+ when a few years ago games were much smaller, and there isn't really any drastic improvement.