So a last week we put out a video about the PS5 and the response was amazing! But since then we have had even more leaks and even an exclusive never seen before image of the PS5. If you haven’t seen that video, check it out on this link. But for now let us give you a breakdown of all the new leaks we have!

LEAKED IMAGE

Ok, so a few days ago, someone who I’m not going to name, sent me an email that contained something very unique, an actual first look at the PlayStation 5!

Right off the bat, this design looks pretty much identical to the leaked PS5 patent that I’ve talked about in the previous video. We have the same V shape vent in the middle, we have the exact same air exhausts on the sides and probably on the back as well.

So on the left, we have the optical drive unit this will support double layer blu-ray drives, up to 100GB in size.

And then we have all the buttons and ports that we’ve had in the actual patent as well including buttons for; On/Standby, Reset, Eject, System Initialisation and Network initialisation.

On the right hand side, we have that weird connector, that looks to be a USB type B port, then 5 more USB type A ports, out of which the 1st one seem to be USB 2.0, judging by the black inside. The next 3 seem to be USB 3.0 or higher, judging by the blue inside and then we have one more that seems to have an actual cable plugged into it. That’s probably USB 3.0 or higher as well.

And then we also have that weird circle which I believed to be a camera, looking at the patent. Especially since we have had reports that Sony and Microsoft as well, could actually be including 4K cameras into the consoles itself, for live-streaming. But looking at this leaked image, I cannot see any camera lens or anything inside of that, so that round thing is probably just the power button in this case.

But as you can see, all of these match perfectly with the actual ports on the PS5 patent. Same layout, same number, same dimensions, so this is indeed the real deal.

Now, there are a few more things in this image, that weren’t visible in the patent. For example, we have a few more light indicators, from 7 to 0 on the left hand side, which probably show the number of controllers connected or, even more likely, the number of CPU cores being used. We also have 2 more status lights – status 2 and status 1. 1 appears to be lit up. Then we have a hidden serial number and some sort of QR code I think, on the right and a label saying that this is a prototype, Prototype 1 in this case, and that it is not for sale.

So yes, it seems like this is indeed a developers unit and not the final version of the PS5.

In that previous video I did say that I found it odd that Sony was patenting the development unit and that I actually believed that to be the final version of the PS5. Now, the thing is the final PS5 would not look identical to this Developer Kit that we see here, but there is a very strong change that it will indeed look very very similar.

The cooling system on the Dev Kit looks to be extremely well designed. It looks like there has been a lot of thought put into this. How it sucks the air from the middle with that massive V shaped intake, which by the way, V is also the roman numeral for 5. The Air is then blown out through the sides and the back, which we cannot see in this image. So the cooling system is very well done, another reason why I think that Sony would definitely not downgrade the cooling in the final unit. Otherwise this is also going to cause a huge performance issue. If the developers work on their games and in the final unit, they end up running worse because the system is throttling due to the downgraded cooling, well that won’t be good for anyone.

Our concept of the PS5 based on the previously leaked patent.

Now, in the last video, we actually did actually make our very own concept based on that leaked patent and we’ve even made some changes of our own. For example, we added a water cooling system that goes all around the console, cooling both the processor and the graphics card, which would be located right in the middle of the unit. The fans will still be present which will further help cool the system down.

Now even though we have made our concept more visually appealing than in the actual Sony Patent by aligning the ports, cleaning up some details and adding LED’s and water cooling, a lot of you said that it was still quite ugly. Which is true, let’s be honest it is not the prettiest console. Personally I don’t really care about the looks as long as it’s properly cooled and it runs at 4K60 like Sony officially confirmed, on the highest settings possible, without any frame drops.

Now something that I did mention in the previous video, was that on the top of the PS5, we had something that kinda looked like rubber feet. Interesting enough, if we go back to that PS5 image and bump up the shadows, you can now easily see that those rubber feet are actually here on the dev kit as well. Now this makes me think that you can also flip the PS5 and have the air intake on the bottom rather than on the top and in that case, it could actually look better.

Now, I tried looking at the image for some more details. EXIF files were all removed, so I couldn’t see any details such as what camera module took this, when it was taken and where but I could at least see the file name. And this was ‘2019-10-10 at 03:49:44am’, so judging by the file name at least, this was taken just a few days ago, probably when no-one else was in the building, because of that time.

So, in conclusion regarding this PS5 design, the bad this is that we still don’t have a look at the final design. However, the good news is that the PS5 will have a brand new cooling system, which like I said, will very likely end up being extremely similar to this patent and it will also look prettier at the same time.

The PS4 Pro dev kit was just gigantic, same for the PS4 dev kit, and the final units ended up being much smaller and thinner and they also looked so much better. So whatever the PS5 is going to look like, it won’t be as ugly as the dev kit unit is.

MARK CERNY

Now, aside from this we’ve also had some more details regarding the PS5 directly from Sony themselves.

The Wired posted a massive article with a ton of exclusive details on the PS5, coming from Mark Cerny, the lead architect on the PS5 and here’s what they said.

First of all, Playstation 5 is the official name. Which I mean I think we all kind of knew that this was going to be the case, but Sony has only referred to the PS5 as “next-gen” console whenever they talked about it. But now, the official name is confirmed and surprise surprise it’s PS5.

Next up the release date is also official. Mark Cerny confirmed that the PS5 is coming in Holiday Season 2020. Which was also what I believed to be the case as well. So a November – December release date is very likely going to be the case here. I would even say that November is looking more likely than December, since that way retailers would have enough time to stock the PS5 in stores for Christmas a month later.

It is also confirmed now that the PS5 will have an AMD Ryzen CPU and an AMD Navi architecture GPU. There will be no more spinning hard-drive, instead we would have an insanely fast flash storage inside the unit, with read and write speeds of close to 2GB/s. Now, the only problem with this, is that this kind of storage is very expensive. So Sony will very likely limit this to 1TB, but hopefully they will be offering some higher capacity models. I personally am quite curious to see how this would impact external storage. Obviously if games are optimised at loading their assets for that insanely fast internal storage, and then some users add an external HDD for more capacity, this would have a huge downgrade on the game’s performance. So I do believe that Sony might limit external devices to external SSDs, or even release some sort of 1st party m.2 enclosure, which with those USB 3.0 or even 3.2 ports, that should be able to reach 1GB/s speeds as well.

Aside from this, Cerny has also confirmed that the PS5 will actually have hardware accelerated Ray-Tracing support. Now we did know that the PS5 will indeed support ray tracing, but we weren’t sure if this would be software based or not. But from the report it seems like it would actually be hardware enabled, just like the Nvidia RTX series of graphic cards! Pretty impressive! This would significantly improve the graphics quality and the realism in games. We’ve seen the same thing happen with Minecraft, where enabling RTX would literally turn it into a different game, something that looks almost as realistic as real life. Whereas Minecraft, as you all probably known, was quite a different story.

A comparison of Minecraft graphics with RTX enabled (Right) and disabled (Left) (Source: Nvidia)

On top of this, Mark Cerny also said that the game size will be noticeably reduced. At the moment since the HDD is so slow the data actually had to be duplicated in some cases on the disk, just to make it more easily accessible. This will no longer be required with the flash storage.

And Mark Cerny as also confirmed that the PS5 will be using 100GB Blu-Ray disks, essentially dual layer Blu-Ray drives AND the PS5 will also support 4K Blu-Ray disks for watching movies, which the PS4 Pro ironically lacked. Sony invented Blu-Ray disks and the Blu-Ray players and they also hold all the rights for those, yet, they didn’t include one on the PS4 Pro for movies.

Something else he mentioned was that the game installation would be different on the PS5. Apparently, you would now be able to select which part of a game to install. For example, you would now be able to uninstall the campaign, if you’ve finished that or even the multiplayer, if it’s something you’re not interested in, and save some crucial space.

The UI will also be redesigned. Now you will be able to see your game missions and even the game lobby, without even starting the game, as all of this will now be visible on the home-screen.

And yeah, there’s even more updates that Mark Cerney has shared, including a completely redesigned controller, so keep an eye out for another video and article, as I’ve got a ton of things I want to cover in that one as well.