The PS4 is now an official thing. It officially exists,
and from what we've been told so far it looks pretty awesome.
With Tech Radar in attendance at the event on the 20th
Feb, Sony revealed some tantalising details about the PlayStation 4 hardware
specs, along with some amazing software features that the new console will
have.
Sadly, and almost unbelievably, we STILL don't know what
the PS4 looks like. However, we do know it's coming out in the US in time for
Christmas 2013, we know about the DualShock 4 controller and we've seen the new
interface and a lot of the features it delivers. Here's everything we know
about the PlayStation 4 so far...
PS4 release date
All we know about the PS4 release date so far is
"Holiday 2013". That's the only detail Sony revealed at the launch
and it's unclear which territories it applies to. Most likely it means the the
U.S. and almost certainly Japan as well. We have a feeling the U.K. and Europe
may have to wait a little longer, maybe even until early 2014.
This is pretty much what happened with Sony's previous
consoles - the PS3 came out in the EU in March - and is backed up by various
leaks and rumours. At least you'll have plenty of time to save up if you live
outside of Japan or the USA.
Zavvi has listed a UK release date of 31st
December which seems extremely unlikely - launching a few days after Christmas?
Surely that's retail suicide.
PS4: Hardware specs
AMD, as we guessed all along, is coursing through this
new system's veins.
Post-event, Sony revealed the system runs on a
single-chip custom processor and utilizes eight x86-64 AMD Jaguar CPU cores,
with a next-gen AMD Radeon based graphics engine powering the way.
So it's very much a PC-based system then, which is great
news for developers who will find it much easier to code games for the next gen
consoles and for PCs. However, that CPU is hardly next-gen - it may have been
modified for this system but the AMD Jaguar platform is by no means the fastest
of its kind - indeed it's slower than Intel's fastest by orders of magnitude.
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However, with fewer redundancies than a PC has, the PS4
will certainly be able to make use of every single Watt of power it draws.
The "highly enhanced PC GPU" is another story.
It's another AMD part - something along the lines of a Radeon 7850 card - and packs
18 GCN units. That may sound a like a lot of techy mumbo jumbo but what it
essentially means is that the GPU packs 18 processing clusters, each packing up
to 64 cores. That provides a lot of parallel processing power, and will thus
handle the majority of the PS4's grunt work. It hits 1.84 TFLOPS of processing mojo. This
is a far more powerful component than the Jaguar CPU and is rumoured to
have the edge on the GPU inside the Xbox 720.
Sony announced at the NYC event that the console will
even use GPU compute features to take advantage of the GPU's raw power - it'll
be used for general computation tasks as well as making games shiny.
Memory
The PS4 will ship packing 8GB of GDDR5 memory. That's
some super-fast stuff right there and should enable lightning fast performance.
Indeed, Sony has revealed that you will be able to power
down the PS4 mid-game and then switch it on again in seconds and pick up right
where you left off. That's the sort of loading power that this memory enables.
Other specs
We're also looking at Blu-ray disk support plus good ol'
DVD, plus HDMI output support as well as Analog-AV out and an optical digital
output.
PlayStation 4
Eye
What's really grabbing though is the development of the
PlayStation 4 Eye, a newly developed camera system that utilizes two
high-sensitivity camera equipped with wide-angle lenses and 85-degree diagonal
angle views.
Sony said the cameras (amounting to 1280 x 800 pixels)
can cut out the image of a player from the background or differentiate between
players in the background and foreground, enhancing game play handily. There's
also mention of logging in using facial recognition and using voice and body movements
to play games "more intuitively."
If you want to know how these specs stack up against what
we know so far about the Xbox 720 (clue:
PS4 is more powerful) - check out our comparison of PS4 and Xbox 720
specs.
PS4 controller: DualShock 4
The PS4 controller comes in the form of the DualShock 4 pad.
Very much a classic design, the DualShock 4 nevertheless offers upgraded
vibrations, enhanced motion sensors and a Vita-like touchpad on the front.
PS4 user interface
The XrossMediaBar (XMB) interface of PlayStations past
has been completely ditched in the PS4, with
Sony instead choosing to design a new OS that looks a lot more like that of the
Xbox 360 than the PS3.
Will the PS4 be 4K capable?
In a chat with Kotaku, Sony has revealed that
the PlayStation 4 will be able to playback 4K/Ultra HD video. However, it will
not upscale to 4K or play games at 4K resolution.
Sony has also confirmed that it will definitely launch a 4K movie service on the PS4 and is
looking at ways it can get around the 100GB downloads required.
Backwards compatibility
The PS4 will definitely not offer native
support for PS3 games. However, there will at
some point be a service on the Sony Entertainment Network that offers
server-side emulation and streaming of games from PS One classics right through
to PS3 Platinum Editions.
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