
Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details - davidbarker
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18401209/sony-playstation-5-details-8k-graphics-ray-tracing-ssds-ps4-backward-compatibility
======
cjf4
Interesting that while Microsoft and now Google are building platforms that
are de-emphasizing local hardware, Sony recognizes this as an opportunity to
differentiate by focusing on how great their box is. Their was a passing
reference to a "cloud strategy", but there hasn't been as much evidence as
their competitors.

This will wind up making for the most interesting console generation since the
32/64 bit era, since the platform differences go beyond hardware specs and
release date. M/G's platform/subscription approach seems to be more in line
with where the world is going, but remains to be seen if the timing's right.

~~~
kbody
Sony had their cloud gaming phase back on 2012 when they acquired Gaikai for
$380m. Not sure what happened with them, maybe it was before its time.

~~~
gambiting
PlayStation Now is still a thing, you can subscribe to play lots of PS3 and
PS4 games on it, they run on Sony's servers and are streamed to your local
device.

~~~
ascagnel_
Not anymore -- while they still offer that feature, it's downplayed in favor
of a Netflix-style rotating library of games that are downloaded and run on
local hardware.

~~~
javagram
PS3 games are still only available through streaming though, and PS Now is
also available on PC where cloud streaming is the only option supplied.

------
snvzz
Wired has another article[0], with more detail, supposedly exclusive.

[0] [https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-sony-next-gen-
console/](https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-sony-next-gen-console/)

~~~
atomi
In regards to the hardware, don't believe the hype until you see it.

~~~
elsonrodriguez
What are you talking about? The Emotion Engine literally taught me about the
value of friendship and love.

------
Tokiin
Great to see we're finally getting an SSD by default in consoles. The only
thing I'm worried about with this is the fact that high capacity SSDs are more
expensive and with a push towards more digital storefronts, I'm wondering how
this will work for the users. Then again, it's also a wonderful chance to push
streaming, so there is that too.

~~~
nicoburns
SSDs have come down in price a lot recently. You can get a 1TB (SanDisk) SSD
for £109 [https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-SDSSDA-1T00-G26-Internal-
Sp...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-SDSSDA-1T00-G26-Internal-Speed-
Write/dp/B07D998212/)

~~~
gambiting
Samsung 1TB 860 QVO is just £90 on Amazon

------
mncharity
Why 8K? Perhaps VR.

VR can be bandwidth intensive. VR immersive-gaming low-end headsets are 60
fps, and high-end are 90 fps. And I've been told 120 fps is a noticeable "like
butter" improvement on 90 fps. So a 8K@30 might mean 4K@120.

VR lenses piss away pixels. With a current 1440x1440/eye, you might get only a
~500 pixel circle of crisply clear pixels. So if you want screen-comparable
resolution you're all set now... if that screen is a 1980's VGA IBM PC. With
this wastage, 5K/eye might let you render virtual 1080p screens.

A headset providing both wide fov and _this year 's_ "high" resolution would
be about 4K/eye. And I'm thinking about modding a narrow-fov drone headset
(less lens blur) with two 4K panels, because I'm tired of waiting for the
game-focused VR HMD market to get around to screen-comparable resolution.

"But won't 8K require an insane graphics card?" No. The old generation of VR
headsets was doing brute force. Foveated rendering _greatly_ reduces GPU load.
And frankly, even without it, I've run a VR desktop ( _non-immersive_ low-fps
with camera-passthrough) on a WMR HMD using a crufty old laptop's integrated
graphics. GPU isn't a blocker for higher resolution HMDs.

~~~
freeflight
Doubtful, afaik consoles use hardware upscalers for high-end resolutions like
4k because the hardware would struggle with natively rendering such
resolutions, as even PC hardware does.

------
arprocter
Interesting to see how/if the cable companies respond to the resolution wars -
last time I checked the only one offering 4k was DirecTV, with everyone else
still at 1080

Newer stuff upscaled from 1080 generally looks fine to my increasingly middle-
aged eyes, but content filmed on older cameras looks awful at 4k (Law and
Order springs to mind)

~~~
iwasakabukiman
A good portion of cable isn’t even 1080p/i. Many cable companies squish things
down to 720p/i to minimize bandwidth and shove more channels into their
lineups.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
And the compression - good gawd. I recently upgrade to a 4k OLED TV, and
watching cable TV almost hurts - the blacks in Game of Thrones are painfully
crushed, incredibly splotchy messes due to the compression.

~~~
asdff
If its any consolation the stream isn't much better

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
That's no consolation at all. Why can't we have nice things?

------
e1ven
The inclusion of ray tracing hardware is interesting to me, and sounds like
good news to Nvidia, who has been pushing ray tracing as part of their RTX
cards.

Even though this uses a custom GPU, if consoles don't support ray tracing, PC
games are unlikely to be designed for it, since most games have cross platform
releases.

It's also interesting to me that they're supporting the existing PSVR - The
new hardware will really help it have some amazing experiences, and it
suggests they're decoupling their VR products from the console releases.

~~~
notTyler
Ray tracing hardware being included kind of worries me actually. Unless
they're selling it at a loss I can't see it being below 500 dollars with the
prices of ray tracing capable cards being as high as they are.

As far as PSVR, the herculean amount of effort required to get something in
the vein of backwards compatibility going between PS3 and PS4 makes me think
it was designed from the ground up to work with basically everything PS4.

~~~
pwthornton
Almost all video game consoles are sold at a loss -- sometimes a huge loss in
the first few years. Making money on console hardware has never been the name
of the game. Every game sold for a Playstation comes with a licensing fee.
It's in Sony's best interest to sell as many games as possible, which often
means selling consoles at a loss.

Sony and other hardware makers also sell a lot of accessories, which often
have huge margins too. The online services they sell also have big margins.

Selling hardware at a loss is one reason that consoles have always punched
much higher graphically relative to price.

If the PS5 comes out for $500, it probably cost Sony around $700 to make it,
and this is with getting massive volume discounts (guaranteed CPU and GPU
contracts over several years with huge volumes of orders coming in) that your
PC can't get.

And then because consoles only have one CPU and GPU combo to program to, you
can get a lot more out of the hardware than you can with a PC.

This is why when the PS5 and the new Xbox launch, it'll probably give you
better fidelity than a much more expense gaming PC -- and it will only get
better visual fidelity for years to come as developers learn to exploit the
architecture better.

~~~
gspetr
> Selling hardware at a loss is one reason that consoles have always punched
> much higher graphically relative to price.

Here's a 2 year old video comparing a $550 PC (with RX480) to PS4 Pro:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HueyUmSHrdo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HueyUmSHrdo)

Also, PS4 Pro specs list its GPU perf at 4.2 Tflops, while a GTX 1080, worth
$499 and predating PS4 Pro by half a year has 8.2 Tflops. It's in the ballpark
of 3.8Tflops of GTX 1060, MSRP $249.

The PS4 Pro's CPU at 2.13 GHz is also not what one would call punching above
your weight. There are cheap i3's more powerful than that.

A console's value is a very dubious proposition if you are in a country which
is given a favorable regional pricing by Steam.

~~~
asdff
It was always the case that you can build a faster PC than a console at
roughly the same price. The difference is the games are optimized for the
console then usually poorly ported to PC so they aren't very comparable.

~~~
gspetr
The inverse can also be true, I've been recently told by console players that
Diablo 3 for instance simply omits rendering of crucial enemy attacks (e.g.
Molten explosions), if there are too many enemies on the screen. And console
versions have less enemies than the PC version to begin with.

------
llbowers
Is there any prediction on the future of stand-alone gaming consoles with 5G
and streaming games(e.g., Google Stadia) coming soon?

While I'm not really much of a gamer now I spent a lot of my childhood playing
video games and the thought of dedicated home game consoles going the way of
arcades makes me sad.

I think I'll finally pick up that Switch I've been planning on...

~~~
freeflight
The thing is Stadia does nothing new, StreamOn comes to mind just like pretty
much every major player in the industry running their own thing, even Nvidia.

Granted: If anybody can make it work, it's gonna be Google, but I'm still
quite skeptical. For many consumers network bandwidth and traffic volume are
still very real issues, and there's not that much Google can do about that on
a global scale, at least in the short time-frame.

Long-term they would have to roll out Google fiber on a global scale and
pretty much go into the ISP business with full commitment, which I just don't
see happening because Google fiber is dead.

------
sneakernets
Nice to see that Sony is still dedicated to hardware, knowing that streaming
is a pipe dream in the USA, and will continue to be so in the coming years.

------
rixrax
I’ve been on Xbox since the first Xbox. But I think I’ll switch over to PS
when this one comes out!

Why? Because Xbox UI has been deteriorating from bad to completely unusable.
Like infuriating! I mostly use it to watch Netflix, prime and occasionally run
Kodi and media player and play CoD or some other game. Would it be possible to
always have these <10 titles on startup screen? Of course no, you may get a
couple of most recent ones, but then you have to navigate to apps (which must
be impossible to find if you don’t know where it is), select all my apps, or
games and finally find what you needed. <\rant>

------
wazoox
8K doesn't make sense, anywhere. I'm middle-aged, and I can't at 2 meters
distinguish 4K from 1080p. Nobody in the world can see the difference between
8K and 4K. It's a shameful waste of resource and ridiculous planned
obsolescence.

In fact, it should probably be forbidden for wasting precious resources for no
good reason.

~~~
dasloop
No matter the screen size?

~~~
whamlastxmas
How many people are going to play their PS5 in an IMAX theater?

------
singhrac
How long have consoles used almost exclusively AMD hardware? It seems like
Xbox One/PS4 were the first generation this was true, is there any lock-in in
this market? How many consoles are sold vs. desktops and laptops?

~~~
theandrewbailey
Depends on how you define _AMD_ and _exclusively_. This is the first
generation that AMD has got both a CPU and GPU into successful mainstream
consoles. The Wii, Wii U, and Xbox 360 have an ATI GPU (from before AMD bought
ATI). Going back further, the Gamecube has an ArtX GPU (from before ATI bought
ArtX).

------
russellbeattie
I wonder if the 3D Audio system will include special hardware like the PSVR
which changes the sound based on the angle of your head? If so, it could be
pretty awesome, as that system is incredible for increasing immersion. If not,
then it's really only a minor improvement except to those with acute hearing.

------
CodeSheikh
What is a "3D audio"?

~~~
bsagdiyev
Disclaimer: I am an SIE employee, but this is my opinion and how I understand
it from the article description. It may not be correct.

It sounds like this will be similar to the way some other sound card
manufacturers have created "3d audio" in that you won't need something like a
7.1 system to be able to better portray where exactly a sound is coming from.
Stereo headphones will be able to give you a more immersive feeling by having
audio be more directional instead of a general area (i.e. left speaker or
right speaker).

~~~
jamescostian
I've always wondered, which is better: a 7.1 system or stereo headphones with
"3d audio"?

And if 3d audio is so great, why doesn't everyone just use stereo speakers
(maybe with a subwoofer)?

~~~
jdietrich
_> I've always wondered, which is better: a 7.1 system or stereo headphones
with "3d audio"?_

Stereo headphones all the way. You only have two ears; they can only ascertain
direction based on a) the amplitude and phase differences between the sound
reaching each ear and b) the frequency and time-domain filtering effects of
your outer ear. These effects can be very accurately emulated using a physical
head model or digital signal processing. Properly recorded and mixed binaural
audio will provide the most convincing spatial effect, because your eardrums
can't tell the difference between a binaural recording and actually being in
an acoustic environment.

 _> And if 3d audio is so great, why doesn't everyone just use stereo speakers
(maybe with a subwoofer)?_

Your living room isn't an anechoic chamber, so you're hearing both the sound
of your speakers and the reverberation of your room. You can tell that you're
listening to two sound sources positioned in front of you, because that room
reverberation provides substantial spatial information about your actual
acoustic environment and degrades the spatial information of the recording.
You can mount speakers really close to your ears, so you only hear the sound
of each speaker with one ear without the colouring effect of your listening
environment; we call such an arrangement "headphones".

~~~
justinclift
> Stereo headphones all the way.

I've done both, and (for me) it's the opposite. You're probably right for
"accuracy of sound", but when gaming having a bunch of powerful speakers
making sound effects gives a better "experience". :)

eg You can feel decent sized speakers with your whole body, which you're
missing when using just headphones

~~~
jdietrich
_> I've done both, and (for me) it's the opposite._

Headphones provide a worse spatial experience than stereo speakers where the
source material has been mixed for speakers; the equation becomes
significantly different with flexible spatial formats like Dolby Atmos.

 _> You can feel decent sized speakers with your whole body_

Using headphones with a subwoofer is a workable (albeit highly antisocial)
option. You can't feel frequencies above about 150Hz, which is comfortably
within the bandwidth of most headphones. You can also fit a low-frequency
transducer to your chair, which will provide a similar feel to a powerful
subwoofer without annoying the neighbours.

[https://soundshaker.com/](https://soundshaker.com/)

Speakers are undoubtedly more convenient and more practical for shared
listening, but headphones provide a simply unmatched price-to-performance
ratio; to get the best out of a pair of speakers, you need to spend at least
as much on acoustic treatment to control the resonance of your listening
environment.

~~~
justinclift
> ... unmatched price-to-performance ratio.

Agreed. I'm back to using headphones myself at the moment (moved location
recently, not yet set up properly), but I'm _really_ missing my proper sound
system setup. ;)

------
tus87
> the new console isn’t just a spec-boosted upgrade of the PS4, like the PS4
> Pro was.

Has any of Sony's next-generation consoles just been "spec-upgraded" versions
of previous ones? What a weird comment.

~~~
britch
I read it as a clarification that they were not writing about a PS4 Pro V2,
but actually, truly the PS5.

~~~
tus87
> We’ve known for a while that Sony is working on its next-generation
> PlayStation console — call it the PlayStation 5 for lack of a better name

When you say it's next generation and deserving of the title PS5....whatever.

------
theandrewbailey
Given that the current Playstation and Xbox are based on (more or less) the
same AMD platform, is it reasonable to expect that the next Xbox will too
(with an identical feature set)?

~~~
wmf
Yes, it is rumored that PS5 is Zen 2 + Navi and Xbox Scarlett is also Zen 2 +
Navi. That leaves room for different RAM, different numbers of CUs, different
accelerators, etc. but they're expected to be pretty similar.

~~~
kristianp
And who's first to market, and is cheaper.

------
BLanen
8K is such an insane waste of processing power.

~~~
ihuman
I wish they make it run at a stable 60fps instead. You have to have a large
screen or sit close to the screen in order to benefit from 4K. I can't imagine
how large or close a 8K screen needs to be for any benefit at all.

~~~
kec
If the hardware is even capable of 8k30 it should be able to do rock solid
4k60, let alone 1080p60

------
scoutt
It seems fine and a reasonable step forward, unless "The last of us 2" is
released as a PS5 exclusive only.

~~~
overcast
I hope so. The first one was one of the greatest gaming experiences of my
entire life. I don't want any tech watered down to support both consoles.

~~~
fetus8
Given how incredible the first game looked on the PS3, and it's performance, I
have a feeling that if TLOU2 is a multi-generation release, Naughty Dog will
pull it off without having to water it down technically. We've seen game-play,
and it looks insane as is already, and supposedly that was on PS4...

Naughty Dog is the studio who can pull it off, on both PS4/PS5, or just PS5.

------
fisherwithac
After reading the more detailed Wired article, I can assuredly place myself in
the "cautiously optimistic" car of the hype train for the PS5 (I myself own a
PS4 Pro that I've been happy with).

There are a lot of solid boxes that Sony's ticking: backwards compatibility
with the previous generation, sticking with physical game copies instead of
moving towards a "games-as-a-service" cloud model, updates to hardware that
justify the new console's number increment, releasing devkits early to get
game devs on board with said hardware, etc.

That being said, as others have mentioned, the support for 8K stupifies me. As
far as I understand it, 8K displays are only just now becoming commercial, and
only for the highest buyers. I'd much rather have higher, consistent
framerates.

Ray-tracing, I'm indifferent to. If they can make it work, great, more
reflective windows and puddles for all. If not, then perhaps game devs can
choose not to implement it.

Shame there will be no additional information on this at E3. Makes me wonder
if they're saving their winning hand for a future round of poker, so to speak.

Edit: spelling

~~~
davrosthedalek
Raytracing is a good thing, not so much because of the better graphics, but
because it enables produce nice graphics with less sophisticated engines and
less artist input. A lot of the lighting etc. is currently baked into
textures, hard coded, hand-optimized. This takes a lot of time. With
raytracing, a lot of this comes "for free", so smaller / indie dev teams can
produce games with AAA level graphics.

~~~
izzydata
At the high cost of performance. As a consumer I am not really concerned with
how easy it is to develop for. I'd rather see high frame rates than bleeding
edge graphics. It's a good technology, but if we can't even manage 60 FPS
minimum in 2020 I will be highly disappointed.

~~~
hombre_fatal
> As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for.

I don't see how this could possibly be. Ease of development could mean the
difference between your next favorite game existing at all. Or having the
funds to become your next favorite game instead of cutting scope into a
mediocre game that never got to realize its full creative ambition.

All upstream concerns contribute to the end result that you do care about.

Anything that helps people create AAA-quality games without needing the
coffers of Electronic Arts is good for gamers.

~~~
ihuman
I don't understand what you are talking about. You don't need AAA-quality
graphics or a 2019 AAA-size budget for a game to be great. The boom of indie
games has shown that great games can have great gameplay and performance, but
without the fancy graphics of an AAA game.

Do you have any examples of the complexity of AAA graphics caused a game to
either have its scope cut, or not exist at all? The only one remotely close to
that is Destiny 1's devtools making created/editing levels difficult. However,
that game had more fundamental problems, like needing to support the PS3 in
addition to the PS4.

~~~
s_m_t
The point is that with ray tracing the indie game and the AAA game might not
look all that different in terms of graphics. Right now AAA games use crazy
40-50 pass shaders and mountains of custom tweaked texture maps to get stuff
looking like it does. With ray tracing you can accomplish a lot of that with
almost zero effort.

------
phil248
It appears that next year Sony will be releasing a console with similar specs
to the PC I purchased last year.

One key difference being that while the PS5 will be backwards compatible with
PS4 games, any PC is backwards compatible with virtually every PC game ever
made.

If there's a case to be made for purchasing a next gen console instead of a
gaming PC - other than artificial reasons like exclusive titles - I'd like to
hear it.

~~~
fetus8
Not sure that Exclusive Titles is an artificial reason. Some of the best games
I've experienced have been released/published by Sony and their first party
studios.

The quality, story, characters, and graphically fidelity are often unrivaled
by their contemporaries. God Of War(2018), Horizon Zero Dawn, the Uncharted
series, and Shadow of the Colossus (remake) are some of my favorite releases
of this generation. I'll gladly plunk down $400+ for their next gen console
for more games like that, I don't focus on the tech specs, but rather the
experience their platform provides.

~~~
wccrawford
IMO, the difference is between titles that wouldn't exist without Sony, and
titles that Sony paid to have the exclusive for, but it wasn't actually
necessary to have the game exist.

I think for the most part that Sony does the former, and I'm fine with that.

Epic has been getting a lock of Flack lately for doing the latter. Games that
were already on Steam were taken off Steam because Epic paid for exclusivity.
That's just scummy, IMO.

~~~
agumonkey
Real world is rarely driven by necessity but by happenity. Lots of thing could
happen without X,Y,Z in theory; but the reality is that exclusive titles on
slightly specialized hardware capture developpers mind more than PC

------
Konnstann
A lot of the things they revealed about the Ps5 don't really "wow" me.

The system better be backwards-compatible, consoles these days are pretty much
more custom PCs, there shouldn't be a problem with backwards-compatibility.
Switching to SSD is also a no-brainer, getting better load times as a result
of using better hardware isn't that big of an accomplishment, and you could
get that performance increase even with a Ps3 if you swapped out the drives
iirc.

~~~
asark
What's the appeal of 8K? Is the support just there for some future VR plans? I
already have my couch about as close to my 55" 4K TV as is reasonable, and can
_barely_ tell the difference between 1080p and 4K video. If I had an absurdly
large TV (70"+) and didn't move my couch back yeah, 4K'd be a clear
improvement. But 8K? Why?

~~~
Dylan16807
For a game, with this amount of GPU power, there's not a tremendous benefit to
an 8k screen.

It's good to be future-proof, and if you are at a desk you can pretty easily
get a screen where the difference is notable. And people are making 8k
content, so you want to support playing that on your flashy high-end machine.

But the important part would be the implications for VR. And also that if it
can output 8k@60, then it can output 4k@veryhigh.

