PS5 vs Xbox Series X – The Complete Buyer’s Guide!

PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X? Which one is the better Console and which one should you guys get? Well, spoilers, they’re both very good Consoles. You’ll be extremely happy with either of these two.

But, there are quite a few differences that might make you pick one over the other. We did a similar comparison back in March, but that was before we knew the Design of the PS5, or even the Games and Graphics reveals, so there’s tons of new details in this video.

So, without any further ado, here is the ultimate PS5 vs Xbox Series X comparison, covering the Design, Specs, Games, Graphics, Special Features and finally…Price.

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Design

Starting off with the Design, the PS5 and the Xbox Series X couldn’t have been more black and white, literally. The Xbox Series X has this very elegant and classy look in all Matte Black. It is bigger and fatter than the Xbox One X, but that’s because of the massive Cooling System that this Console needs. 

In terms of the Ports, we have three USB Type A Ports, all are USB 3.2. We have one on the front and the other two are on the back. In addition, we have a HDMI 2.1 Port, which supports 4K120 as well as 8K60, an Ethernet Port and a Kensington lock so that you can lock your Xbox in place. This is very useful for public spaces, as well as the Expansion Slot for the first party SSD Expansions, which I’ll be covering in just a second. 

The Digital-Only Version of the PS5 is definitely the better looking of the two.

The PS5 on the other hand, is completely different. First of all, it comes in this really nice Matte White colour, with Glossy Black accents and a blue LED strip which I’m assuming would change its colour based on the different states that your PlayStation can be in, such as Rest Mode, Sleep, Powered-On and so on. Size-wise, the PS5 is gigantic. It is much taller than even the Xbox Series X and also taller than pretty much any Console ever made. It is also said to be very heavy at 4.8kg, however, the PS5 is slimmer than the Xbox. 

When it comes to the Ports, the PS5 features one USB C Port on the front, as well as a USB Type A. We don’t really know any other details and Sony hasn’t shown us the back of the Console just yet. It is safe to assume that it will have an HDMI 2.1 Port, an Ethernet Port, a PSVR 1 Port and likely even a PSVR 2 Port, which will allow the External Receiver for that to be connected. The PSVR 2 will be a completely wireless Headset. Also, I do expect a few more USB A Ports on the back. 

Now, there will be two models of the PS5, a Regular Version and a Digital Only Version, which lacks the Blu-Ray Drive. This Digital Only Version looks much better as it’s perfectly uniform. The Disc Version looks like it has this tumour that grew on its side, it doesn’t look good at all and it’s pretty obvious that when Sony designed the PS5, they designed the Digital Version first as that’s really the future. Speaking of models, there is a rumoured second model of the Xbox Series X just around the corner, this is the Lockhart / Xbox Series S, with this possibly having a very square and boxy design. Personally, I really do like both but I am leaning more towards the Digital Version of the PS5’s Design. Something about it just makes it look more futuristic and high-tech, I’m really into that.

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Specs

When it comes to the Specs, both of these Consoles feature an AMD CPU and GPU alongside hardware based Ray-Tracing and a very fast SSD. So, you would assume that these Consoles are identical in terms of the Performance, but that’s not really the case.

The Series X splits its RAM into two chunks, at different speeds.

CPU-wise, both feature an AMD Ryzen Processor based on the Zen 2 Architecture. These are basically Desktop class CPU’s that you would find in AMD’s latest offering. They’re both 8-Core Processors, however, the Xbox Series X is clocked at 3.8GHz, while the PS5’s CPU is clocked at 3.5GHz. Not only that, but Sony has confirmed that the PS5’s CPU will be running at a Variable Frequency, meaning that while the Xbox will be running at a constant 3.8GHz, the PS5 can go up to 3.5GHz, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it would run this high all of the time. This was apparently done so that the PS5 has more power to divert to the GPU, when needed. Otherwise, the CPU might consume a ton of power even when the Game itself doesn’t actually require that much. 

On the GPU side, both GPU’s are based on AMD’s new Navi/RDNA 2.0 Architecture, which isn’t even out for PC yet. The Xbox GPU has 52 Compute Units, or “Cores” that each clocked at 1.825GHz, while the PS5 has 36 Compute Units, clocked at 2.23GHz. This translates to the Xbox having 12.15 TFLOPS of GPU Compute Power, while the PS5 has 10.28 TFLOPS. That’s a 1.87 TFLOP difference. Fun fact, the difference between the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X was 1.8 TFLOPS, so this is quite significant. 

RAM wise, both have 16GB of GDDR6 Memory, but they’re both using it in a fairly different way. For example, the PS5 has a 448GB/s Memory Bandwidth for the entire 16GB chunk. The Xbox, on the other hand, has 560GB/s but only for 10GB, while the other 6GB are running at a slower 336GB/s. 

At this point, it seems like the Xbox Series X is superior, Performance wise, to the PS5, which is indeed correct. However, the PS5 does have one big advantage when it comes to the Storage. Both Consoles now have a Flash Storage Module, or an SSD, compared to the mechanical HDD’s that the current-gen Consoles have.

Microsoft have Proprietary Drives, but the PS5 allows Third-Party Support.

The Xbox Series X comes with a 1TB SSD, while the PS5 comes with a 825GB SSD. But, while the Xbox’s SSD has a read speed of 2.4GB/s, almost 50 times faster than what the Xbox One, the PS5’s SSD has a read speed of 5.5GB/s, 110 times faster than the PS4 and Xbox One’s Drive. I’ll go into more detail about why this is important when we get to the Graphics section of this video.

Now, with both of these Consoles, you will be able to expand the Storage if you really need to. On the Xbox, Microsoft will be selling Drives that they’ve developed in partnership with Seagate, which will allow you to add one extra Terabyte to the Console. 

Sony won’t be selling any first party SSD, instead, you will be able to buy any third party m.2 Drive and replace the Internal Storage with that. However, it will need to have at least the speeds of the Internal Drive. As of right now, there are no Drives that even match that speed. 

You can indeed connect External HDD’s to both of these Consoles, but you would not be able to play any next-gen Games from those as they’re simply way too slow. You can store your current-gen Games on those, which will be playable on both of these Consoles. 

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Games

But the specs really don’t mean anything if there are no great games to take full use of them. So, what games are we getting for each Console? Well, this is where the biggest differences between these two Consoles really show.

‘Horizon: Forbidden West’ is just one of the many AAA Exclusives that Sony will have before there are any on the Series X (Source: Sony).

On the PS5, you will have Exclusive Games. So, just like with the PS4 now, all new games made by Sony studios will only work on the PS5. That means that the next ‘Spider-Man’, the next ‘Horizon’, the next ‘God of War ‘and so on. The good news is that those games will look absolutely incredible and truly next-gen. The bad news is that you need to buy a PS5.

When it comes to the Xbox, things are entirely different. Microsoft says that for the first two years, there will be no Exclusives at all on the Xbox Series X. This means that any new Game that you will buy for the Xbox will work on the Series X, the Xbox One X, the Xbox One S, the Xbox One as well as on any Windows PC. So, the great news here is that you don’t really have to buy the Xbox Series X to take advantage of the new Games. The bad news however, is that the Games will not look as good as the Exclusives will on the PS5. There’ll be more about that when it comes to the Graphics. 

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Graphics

So now, which Console will have better Graphics? This is also really tricky.

If you’re into cross-platform Games, such as ‘Call of Duty’, ‘Fortnite’, ‘Minecraft’, ‘Overwatch’, ‘Assassin’s Creed’ or basically anything that works on both Playstation and Xbox, those Games will run better on the Xbox. Most of these Developers have already confirmed that the Xbox Series X will run their Games at a higher Resolution and higher Frame-Rates. In fact, Microsoft is aiming for a full Native 4K experience at least 60 FPS, with some Games even targeting 120 FPS. 

Footage from ‘Halo Infinite’ did not showcase the best of what the Series X can offer (Source: Xbox).

Sony, on the other hand, hasn’t really confirmed that they’re even targeting 60 FPS. Insomniac Games for example, the Developer of the next ‘Spider-Man’ Game, have confirmed that ‘Spider-Man: Miles Morales’ will have a 60 FPS Mode. But, their Tweet is a bit strange and it sort of implies that you’ll have to choose between 4K and 60 FPS or if you want 60 FPS, you’ll need to have some graphical options disabled. 

Since the PS5 will indeed have Exclusives at launch, these games will indeed look true next-gen, while the launch Games on the Xbox Series X, since these are cross platform/non-exclusives Games, will just look like the current-gen in higher Resolution and at a higher Frame Rate.

Take a look at ‘Halo Infinite’, which we just got a gameplay reveal for last week. The game looks decent, it runs in Native 4K60 but the Graphics themselves just look like current-gen. Take a look at the Grass and the Lighting, now compare it to, let’s say, ‘The Last of Us: Part 2’ or ‘Ghost of Tsushima’. In these games, the Foliage Density is significantly higher. Not only that, but in ‘The Last of Us: Part 2’, you can even interact with the foliage to the point where you can bump into a Pine Tree and you’ll see the snow fall off of it. Also, pay attention to the Lighting and compare both of these to how it looks in Halo Infinite. Also, keep in mind that ’The Last of Us: Part 2’ and ‘Ghost of Tsushima’ are PS4 games, ‘Halo Infinite’ is a next-gen title.

Long story short, when you develop a Game, you have to develop it on the weakest common denominator and then let the more powerful hardware run that same Game at a higher Resolution and Frame-Rate.

Otherwise, if you develop the Lighting and the Physics on a higher-end Platform, porting that down is going to be incredibly difficult. For example, ‘Halo Infinite’ was developed on the Xbox One and then ported onto the Xbox One X, the Series X and then onto PC.

For a PS4 Game, ‘The Last of Us: Part 2’ looked truly next-gen (Source: Sony).

Luckily, Microsoft has also shown a few Games developed on the Series X, which would not work on the Xbox One at all, just the Series X and PC.  Those games were the new ‘Fable’, ‘State of Decay 3’, ‘Forza Motorsport 8’ and a few more. Finally, these definitely looked like next-gen Games.  Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn’t said when we’ll get these Games, but it seems like they will all come out after those first two years as again, these Games will now be “Exclusives” rather than Games that also work on the Xbox One series, in order to take full advantage of the hardware inside the Series X. 

So, at launch, cross platform Games will look better on the Xbox One X, while Exclusives will look better on the PS5 as the Xbox won’t actually have any until two years after launch. We don’t yet know to what extent cross platform Games run better on the Series X just yet, this is because the PS5 does indeed have that much faster SSD. If we take a look at ‘Star Citizen’, a Game that is actually a PC Exclusive, it has been fully optimised with SSD’s in mind and if you have an m.2 Flash Storage Module for example, that game can run at up to 20 FPS higher than if you were running the same Game, on the same platform, with the same specs, but on a HDD.

The speed difference between a HDD and a standard 2GB/s m.2 Flash Module is a factor of 40x. The speed difference between the PS5’s SSD and the Xbox SSD is only about 2x. This is not enough to give us 20 FPS or anything like that on the PS5, but likely something that can make this Performance gap between these two Consoles, look smaller.

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Special Features

So what about the Special Features? Is there anything unique in terms of each Console that might make you pick one, over the other? Well, the Controllers are a pretty big difference here. 

The Xbox Series X Controller looks almost identical to the Xbox One X Controller, which is not necessarily a bad thing as that Controller was regarded by many as the best Controller on the market. This has been improved this time by adding a Dynamic Latency Input which is supposed to significantly reduce the Input Lag, making this Controller likely the best  choice if you’re into competitive gaming. 

Microsoft have very much taken the approach of ‘If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it’.

However, the PS5’s Controller is a complete redesign. Not only that, but it also implements a Touch-Bar and Haptics Support similar to what we have on modern Smartphones, just on steroids. This will give you the ability to feel different surfaces in a Game, I’m really curious to see how well it works.

The Xbox Series X though, has a massive advantage in terms of Backwards Compatibility. It allows you to play Xbox One, Xbox 360 and even original Xbox Games, while the PS5 will only allow you to play PS4 games with the DualShock 4. Also, the Xbox does feature the Xbox Game Pass, which lets you play a selection of Games via a monthly subscription, which is pretty amazing if you just want to try some Games out. Sony does have PlayStation Now, which is also a monthly subscription, but this one streams Games rather than downloading them, so the quality is affected here. Some Games can indeed be downloaded though, but only a few. 

However, one big advantage to the PlayStation could be the new 3D Audio Engine. This is a hardware-based engine, which will immerse you significantly more into a Game by giving you 7.1 Surround Sound in all PS5 Games. 

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Price 

And finally, let’s talk about the price. So the prices have not been revealed as of yet, which means that the prices that I’m going to give you are based on leaks from some reliable sources. 

The PS5 is said to start at $400 for the Digital Version and $500 for the Disk Version. The Xbox Series X is said to start at $500, but we’ve also seen reports that Microsoft will also launch another Xbox, the Xbox Series S, which would start at around $300. However, the Series S will be considerably less powerful than the Xbox Series X, whereas both versions of the PS5 are identical in Performance. 

PS5 – Major Controller Updates, Pre-Orders, Price & More!

We’ve had some major PS5 updates over the past week, ranging from the first hands-on video with the DualSense Controller, to Pre-Order Updates, Performance Updates, Games, Graphics and so much more. So, get those snacks ready and here’s everything new in terms of the PS5!

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Pre-Orders 

First things first, there were a ton of rumors that the PS5 Pre-Orders would start as soon as possible. These were mostly coming from Twitter leaker ‘IronManPS5’, previously known as ‘PSERebus’, who’s actually been very accurate in the past. He started tweeting that the PS5 Pre-Orders would start on Monday, 13th July. This, unfortunately, did not happen.

We then heard the news that the PS5 Controller would get a hands-on look on Friday, 17th July, and that that would also be when the Pre-Orders would start. That did not happen either. But luckily, in that hands-on video/interview that Geoff Keighley had with Eric Lempel, the Global Head Marketing of PlayStation, Eric debunked those Pre-Order rumors as false. He said that Sony will let their customers know, ahead of time, when the Pre-Orders would start. They wouldn’t just start out of the blue and catch everyone by surprise, which is the good news.

A more strict & direct approach from Sony, with the Pre-Orders.

The bad news, or maybe this is actually good news as well, is that we now have confirmation that you would only be allowed to buy one PS5 per household as the stock would be quite low at launch. This was found by a Reddit user who was browsing the web page source code on ‘direct.playstation.com'. It seems that when you’ll try to add another PS5, you’ll get an error message saying that you can only purchase one Console. Now, in that code, it is revealed that Sony will also be adding labels on certain PS4 products that would be PS5 compatible, this includes Games and likely some PS4 Accessories as well. 

Speaking of Labels, we actually got to see the PS5 label that would be on Game Cases, the top left label that we’ve had on PS4 & PS3 Game-Cases and so on. For the first time, with the PS5, the Label is black & white, so no more Blue PS5 Logo or anything like that. Sony seems to have fully embraced the white & black colour scheme that they’ve introduced on the PS5 Console and the PS5 Controller. I do love the minimalist look they’ve gone for.

Finally, seen as how we’re talking about Pre-Orders and Boxes, both Nikkei and Bloomberg report that Sony is increasing the PlayStation 5 manufacturing by around 50% with aims of reaching 10 million units by the end of 2020. Just to give you guys an idea, the PS4 sold 4.2 million units in 2013. The PS4 was released on November the 15th, which is around the same rumoured released date that the PS5 is said to come out. 

The Gaming Community has increased significantly since 2013 and considering the price of the PS5, I do expect loads of users wanting to upgrade to the new Console. I don’t see twice the number of units sold as launch, compared to the PS4, I think that’s a bit too optimistic. But, if Sony manages to manufacture 10 million units of the PS5, that would solve the entire stock issue at launch.

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Price 

Now, let’s talk about the price, ‘IronManPS5’ tweeted the full prices for not just the PS5 itself, but also the prices for the Accessories. Even though he was wrong in terms of the Pre-Orders, he was right in the past, numerous times. So, even if his price leaks are not 100% correct, they should at least be very close to the final retail prices. 

He says that the PS5 will cost $500, €500 or £450 in the UK. The PS4 Pro was priced at $400, the PS4 was also priced at $400, whereas the PS3 was priced at $500. This might seem like a lot, But do keep in mind that unlike a Smartphone, which can cost way over $1,000 and only used for two years or so, you would actually end up using a Console for a lot longer. This will probably be around five years or even more, which means that the $500 would be split into something like $100 a year, compared to $500 a year, which is what a high-end Smartphone would cost you.

The Digital Only PS5 may only come in at £350.

This $500 is just for the regular PS5, here will also be a ‘disk-less’ / Digital Only version of the PS5, which is said to cost $400, €400 or £350, the same price as the PS4. The only reason why you would get the more expensive PS5 is if you have any disk-based PS4 Games that you still want to play on the PS5. I do have a few disk Games, but I bought all of those when the PS4 came out, then I started moving towards Digital Games. Those old games that I got on disk can always just be bought again from the PlayStation Store as they’ve gotten so inexpensive now. I personally think that I would be going with the Digital Only version, especially since I really do prefer the way it looks.

The DualSense Controller is said to be $60, €60 or £55. The Charging Station for these Controller, which can charge two of them at the same time, that’s said to cost $30, €30 or £25. The PS5 Media Remote will also have the same price. The PS5 HD Camera is said to cost $60, €60 or £55 and finally, the Pulse 3D Wireless Headset will apparently cost $160, €180 or £130. I would say that these are some very good prices, for both the Consoles and the Accessories. 

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Controller Update 

Now it’s time for the big one, the Controller.

As I mentioned before, Geoff Keighley, who’s pretty well known in the Gaming Industry, was the very first person outside of Sony themselves and the Developers, who has laid his hands on the PS5 Controller. The first thing I took from the full video and interview with PlayStation’s Eric Lempel, was the actual size of the Controller.

We’ve seen some alleged leaked images of the DualSense, where it looked gigantic, but now Geoff has showed us a side-by-side image against the PS4’s DualShock Controller. While the DualSense is indeed larger than the DualShock 4, it is not significantly larger. Realistically, the size and the weight should in fact make it more comfortable than the DualShock 4 was, at least this is what Sony is saying.

The first ‘hands-on’ clip with the DualSense revealed it’s not quite as unwieldy as we may have first thought.

We also got to see the bottom of the Controller for the very first time, which was something that for some strange reason, Sony has avoided showing. This made me think that maybe it was because Sony added two customisable Buttons there, just like the Back-Button Attachment on the DualShock 4. But now that we finally got to see the bottom of it, there are no Buttons at all, just a sticker.

Geoff also mentioned that the Speaker on the DualSense had a wider range of sound, compared to the DualShock 4 Speaker and also the fact that the Controller had a nice hefty weight to it. The game that he got to test was Astro’s Playroom, which is a spin-off from the PSVR’s highly praised AstroBot VR game, just in non-VR this time. The game lets you fully explore the functionality of the Controller, test out the Haptic Feedback, the Touchpad, the Adaptive Triggers and so on. He mentioned how cool the Triggers felt now that the Game Developers could actually implement different levels of pressure in them so that when you draw a Bow, it would feel entirely different from when you would fire a Gun. I can’t wait to try this.

I was expecting Geoff to be blown away by the Haptics or at least talk more about them. He did mention how realistic the game feels but I was just expecting him to praise the Haptic Touch a bit more.

Speaking of Astro, I’m assuming that Geoff was indeed playing this on a PS5 unit, which means that he also got to experience the PS5 to some extent but he didn’t talk about that at all here. However, Eric, PlayStation’s Global Head of Marketing, did talk a bit about the PS5 itself. Aside from the Pre-Order news that I mentioned before, he did talk about how Sony believes in Console Generations and Console Exclusives.

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Games 

This was in contrast to Microsoft, who will be enforcing Cross-Generation Compatibility for Games. So, any Games developed for the Xbox Series X, at least for the next two years, will also need to run on the Xbox One X as well as the Xbox One. I’ll talk about this more, in a separate video, so do Subscribe and enable Notifications for that. 

But until then, Eric made a good point here, saying that Games such as ‘Ratchet & Clank – Rift Apart’, would not even be technically possible on previous Consoles at all. This is because in this game, which is a PS5 Exclusive, you can instantly travel through different dimensions and take the fights from one dimension to another, which is only achievable thanks to the PS5’s insanely fast SSD, which is more than 100 times faster than the PS4’s Hard-Drive. Making this game run on the PS4 would involve changing the Gameplay and the Story of the Game.

‘Spider-Man: Miles Morales’ was not fully developed on the PS5, which may explain some of the apparent compromises (Credit: PlayStation).

Not only that, but if you make the game for the PS4 first, which you would do in a down-up development cycle and is how most Games are made, you would not be able to implement such ground breaking features.  Again, more about this in a separate video, but Eric does have a very good point. This is why the next PlayStation exclusive games to launch, such as ‘Spider-Man: Miles Morales’, ‘Ratchet & Clank -  Rift Apart’, ‘Horizon: Forbidden West’ and many more will only run on the PS5.

Speaking of Games, Insomniac games have confirmed that ‘Spider-Man: Miles Morales’ would run at 60FPS on the PS5, sort of. They said that you would get to choose between a 4K Mode and a Performance Mode with 60FPS.

So, here’s the thing, we were all hoping that this Console generation would finally be a 60FPS generation. Microsoft have already confirmed that their standard would be 60FPS for Games and even 120FPS in some cases. We’ve seen some rumors that Sony was planning to do the same in all of the Games to be released for the PS5. However, judging by what Insomniac has said, it seems like while you can indeed play Spider-Man Miles Morales in 60FPS, you would have to downgrade a few graphical settings and apparently, the Resolution too.

Now, we don’t really know what these downgrades would be as of yet, but I would say that in the best case scenario, we can turn off Ray-Tracing to enable 60FPS. In the worst case scenario, not only will Ray-Tracing be disabled for 60FPS, but the Resolution would also be dropped to 1440p, or even 1080p, and then dynamically upscaled to 4K. Judging from Insomniac’s message, it is looking quite likely that we will have some drop in Resolution as well. 

Now, the good news is that ‘Spider-Man: Miles Morales’ wasn’t fully developed on the PS5. It’s still using the same engine as the 2018 ‘Spider-Man’, just modified to take better advantage of the PS5. It will be only when games such as ‘Horizon: Forbidden West’ or the next ‘God of War’ come out, games which have been fully developed on the PS5 from scratch, that we might see 60FPS as a default on the highest possible settings.

For a start, it seems that Sony would be focusing on the highest possible Graphics first, and then the Frame-Rate. To be honest, even-though I’m personally disappointed in this decision, games such as ‘Last of Us: Part 2’ look absolutely breath-taking on the PS4 Pro, it honestly looked as if I was playing a PS5 game, it looked that good. So, I cannot wait to see what Sony has in store next.

If you look closely, you can still see a little bit of blue on the left-hand image (Credit: PlayStation Lifestyle).

Speaking of that, we actually had a recent leak from what seems to be a retailer that was listing a few Sony products. One of those products is a Black PS5 and a Black Controller with both having a red LED light, as opposed to the standard blue LED light that the White PS5 has. Now, we have heard many rumors that Sony is indeed working on different colour schemes for the PS5, one of them being black, so this could indeed be the real thing. I would expect Sony to give us an update on the colours as the pre-orders open. 

Personally, I do think that this image is fake. It does look very photoshopped, not even to mention errors such as the back of the Controller still being white, or the red light still having a blue glow on the Console. This is definitely fake. Regardless of that being fake, we’ve actually modelled our very own concept of the PS5, in black, and I’m definitely team Matte Black. I would definitely go for this option, should Sony give us the option at launch.

You can of course change the colour of the LED bar on the PS4, kind of. This was done by the system itself, based on the games. I’m hoping that with the PS5, we would also have the option to have custom colours, that would be quite cool!

The Last of Us: Part II - Full Review (Spoilers)

This is going to be my Full Review of ‘The Last of Us: Part II’ and this will include FULL SPOILERS for the game, so if you haven’t played it yet, I would highly suggest you do so and check out the Story Trailer above if you haven’t already.

The first thing you might notice is that… I’m not Daniel. I normally deal with Marketing and other assorted behind the scenes stuff at ZONEofTECH but as the resident Video Game nerd, I felt that I couldn’t let this opportunity go to waste. Whether you like this game or not, it’s impact and scale has been massive and if nothing else, has sparked a lot of discussion.

I had planned to put this out a little earlier but as it became clear how divisive and polarised the online Gaming Community had become after the game launched, I felt like I needed to finish the Story first and experience everything for myself before giving a more well-rounded and considered opinion. So, here it is (thanks to Sony for sending us over a code).

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A (not so) Lost Legacy

Naughty Dog had a big reputation to live up with the ‘The Last of Us: Part II’ (Image: Pinterest)

Naughty Dog have a rich history of producing some of the most memorable and technically impressive games out there. From ‘Crash Bandicoot’, ‘Jak & Daxter’ to ‘Uncharted’, there is no doubt that these guys are capable of producing Video Games that are of the absolute top-tier. With this in mind, and that the first game of the ‘Last of Us’ series was arguably the game of its Console Generation, there was an expectation to deliver something of equal, if not higher, magnitude.

Playstation have also built themselves an extensive library of exceptional exclusives, such as the most recent ‘God of War’, ‘Horizon Zero Dawn’ and ‘Spider-Man’ to name a few. Sony also produce the new ‘Spider-Man’ movies with Tom Holland who, coincidentally, will be portraying Nathan Drake in the upcoming ‘Uncharted’ movie. All of this adds to expectation for Naughty Dog. This game has been built up to the point where anything less than absolute perfection is deemed a failure by the more hardcore segments of the fan-base, this is where the problem starts.

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The Giraffe in the Room

Let’s just get right into it and address the story, which has set the internet on fire over the past week or so. I will warn you one more time for SPOILERS, avert your eyes if you plan to play it yourself. 

The catalyst that sets this game in motion is Joel’s death at the hands of a new character, Abby. He is quite viciously beaten to death with a golf club, staying alive just long enough for Ellie to burst in and watch him die. This is after having his leg damn near blown off by the character who we are made to play with for around half of the entire game afterwards. I have seen a lot of anger towards this, with people saying that Joel deserved better. But Joel did some dark things and made a lot of enemies in the first game so, while I do agree that the manner in which he was killed off was a little gratuitous, I can understand why this had to happen the way that it did. The game is very deliberately pushing a certain narrative at this point, the overkill and ambiguity surrounding this event is meant to invoke anger from the player. Joel saved Abby from an Infected Horde and she does this, why?

Some of the trailers led us to believe some things about the game, which turned out to not be the case (Image: Den of Geek).

This is seemingly unjustified and puts you in Ellies head, goading you to carry on and get the guys who killed Joel for reasons we don’t yet know. But we do know they deserve what they get, right? What follows is a slow descent into Ellie’s personal own rainy, Pacific North-Western Hell, with her state of mind deteriorating, methods becoming more brutal and the people she cares about paying the price for her personal vendetta. She eventually gets what she wants, coming face-face with Abby around half-way through the game. 

The Story then does a complete u-turn and makes you play through the timeline again as Abby, with the people who killed Joel. This time however, you’re dealing with on ongoing Faction War between the Washington Liberation Front (who have de facto control of the City after overthrowing the Military) and the Seraphites (referred to as ‘Scars’ by the WLF). These ‘Scars’ are painted as savage, religious fanatics who want to pull down the existing power structures and establish their own new world with the teachings of their revered founder, a God-like figure in their eyes. We encounter them as Ellie but don’t really explore their role until we play as Abby.

We also explore the motives for Abby wanting Joel dead and as it turns out, her Father was the Doctor that Joel killed while rescuing Ellie from the Firefly Hospital in the first game. Her group are also ex-Fireflies, fuelling the flames. As we explore Abby’s past and the journey she takes to Jackson, I began to empathise with, and see the depth of a character I vilified for so long. It completely changed the way I viewed the game. I hate what Abby did, but I get it. Her character arc was superbly laid out.

Was all of that worth it in the end? (Image: GamesRadar).

The game mirrors the Ellie & Abby characters and by the time it all comes to a head again, both characters have very similar motives for doing what they are doing and it’s impossible to say who’s ultimately in the right. There are secondary female characters on each side who have differing fates from the same scenario, at this point the Writers are almost literally hitting you over the head with that metaphorical mirror. This is all about perspective. In this world, there is no such thing as heroes or villains in the traditional sense, which is fresh from a story-telling point of view because, whilst I love Marvel movies and the like, there’s enough of that around right now. Everyone is a villain or a hero to someone else, depending on what side you’re on. Even the Seraphites, they serve as a metaphor for overcoming certain Social issues, but that’s a discussion within itself.

In the end, Ellie still can’t let go and the game ends with her worse off than before, insinuating that this cycle of revenge that she found herself in did more damage than her actual loss did in the first place. This was an exceptional Story told expertly well, but with a game like this, you’ll never please every single player. I am glad Naughty Dog took this direction though, seemingly embracing the fact that the game was going to get criticised one way or another and just made a game that they felt was real and authentic. I feel like the game justifies its existence and pushes the narrative forward in a way which is true to the identity of the first iteration. That being said, I do feel some of the ‘Jump-Scare’ moments were predictable & repetitive and that the whole back-story behind Joel’s big secret reveal should not have been cut into a flashback. Additionally, I would be very interested to see how this game would have played if it was laid out chronologically. This is not a comprehensive run-down of the entire Story as that would literally take me pages on pages to say in full, I will say again, try to experience the full thing first-hand.

Onto topics that are little less contentious, I’m going to avoid splitting this off into sections as each technical aspect of this game feeds so well into the other that it’s sometimes difficult to draw the line. I’ll start with the first thing you notice, the Graphics. I would say this is second only to the PS4 remaster of ‘Shadow of the Colossus’, in my opinion. From the snowy Mountains of Jackson to the ruined City of Seattle, every scene in this game looks like it was pulled straight out of a big-budget Hollywood film and shot on a Camera, rather than digitally manufactured.

The game couples huge set-pieces with the most acute details (Image: USgamer).

It’s massive too. Each tiny part of this world has been meticulously crafted and it does not suffer from that sheer scale. There are scenes that make the world feel huge, the buildings in Seattle for instance, but then you look around and notice all of the other tiny little things that are there. Some of my favourite moments, from a Graphics standpoint, were ones that made use of Naughty Dog’s talents with Water & Snow Effects. It’s the small details in their behaviour and how they interact so fluidly with what the player is doing and what is happening in the game that give that added layer of immersion. When I first loaded up the game and saw that Main Menu, it had me sold there and then.

The Weather Effects are put to equally good use too. You might notice that Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fog and Lighting is used at very specific points, this is the game very subtly trying to make you feel or act in a certain way. It is devices like this that help guide you through certain points in the game and are a good way of showing you what to do without being explicit. The Lighting is particularly well-done, it’s not over-produced and comes across as natural to the point where you forget to take special notice of it, just because of how well it fits in to every part of the game.

I will give a special shout-out to the Gun Customisation too, the detail in those close-up scenes on the Workbench is straight-up ridiculous. The transitions between these areas are seem-less and at no point did I feel that a menu or a cutscene really took me out of the game. The Infected themselves are just horrifying, but in the best possible way. It speaks a lot about character design when an enemy can make you feel physically ill. There’s one in particular that’ll stick with me, but I’ll leave that one for you to discover.

The boat chapters helped showcase some very technically impressive environments (Image: Evening Standard).

If you’ve played the first game, then it won’t take you long to get into the flow of this one, many of the systems are similar (Weapons, Crafting, Exploration etc). However, especially when you’re playing as Ellie, the game is just so much faster than the first one. Combat is fluid and refined from what we saw in the last game, it’s fast-paced and the environment is put to good use in terms of the animations, some areas might allow you to be bit more creative with how you take down some enemy types. My only complaint is that the Companion AI can sometimes be a little dumb in their movement and is invisible to enemies, even when clearly in their line of sight. Generally speaking though, the Enemy AI Pathing is well thought out, it’s sometimes unpredictable in a good way so you really have to keep your bearings.

Resource management is key, especially on the higher difficulties where they become increasingly sparse. Enemy types can be varied in certain encounters, including: Runners, Clickers, Bloaters, Stalkers, Armed Human NPC’s and Dogs amongst others. The game really makes you think about how to engage and pushes you to utilise everything around you in order to survive. Plus, using all of your Ammo on lighter enemies can have an effect down the line when you find yourself up against something heavier, with only your knife or a wooden board (this happened to me more than it really should have).

There’s a lot to see, too much for just one play-through (Image: GosuNoob).

The levels have a lot more verticality to them to really help flush out the amount that you can see, do and find, making these threats ever-present. This is a ‘Last of Us’ game, so be sure to open up every drawer and look in every corner, there’s always something else that you haven’t seen. My play-through was roughly 32 hours, 10 hours of which was just me looking around a cleared area for Resources & Collectibles. I did start to go slightly insane at points as there are a grand total of 266 Collectibles to find across the 11 Acts/45 Chapters. There are also several PlayStation Easter Eggs scattered around, including Nathan Drake’s Ring, a Precursor Orb from ‘Jak & Daxter’ and a few of the fat PS3’s (as the world effectively ended in 2013) here and there. Also, pro-tip, always expect the worst when resources seem to getting more common and pay attention to what the game gives you, because it might be an indicator that you will need them very soon. Also, they are scattered throughout the world as you would expect them to be in real-life. For example, you will find Cloth in Bedrooms, Alcohol in Bars, Supplements in Bathrooms, Parts in Garages and so on. These are the little details which you might think are pretty common sense, but make the experience so much more real.

Realism is a huge aspect of this game and a lot of that comes through Audio. The Sound Design is immense and use of Music is well-placed and used to flush out the world that extra step further. The Guitar is one of the key symbols of the game and is Ellie’s strongest link to Joel, its integration in terms of the Controls is also very intuitive and unique. It almost makes me feel like I can play the Guitar (which I can’t), this leads into another massive part of this Games’ production, which Accessibility. If you’re hard of Hearing, Blind or have Physical Disabilities, there are features in this game that can allow you to still enjoy & experience it. I saw a video on Twitter of a young man who was Blind, playing the game. It was one of the more wholesome things that I saw on this subject and goes to show how awesome Video Games are, with the impact that they can have.

32 hours well spent (Image: Dexerto)

I could honestly write a full on Book about this game, if given the time, but now I have to find a way to sum this up and not waffle on and on for hours. In Summary, this is not a game that I can that you will ‘enjoy’ the whole time, so to speak. This game is designed to make you think, question and feel, which is the hallmark trait of any worthwhile experience in my view. The ending was ambiguous, but this is the end of Part 2, not the end of the Story. There is still surely more to come with series and judging by Naughty Dog’s history, I have a theory that there will be four ‘Parts’ to this in total. We will see.

The Game is certainly re-playable, with fluid & brutal Gameplay, that level of production and a compelling Story, you will have no problem going through this game a second time while still getting that same sense of fulfilment. Naughty Dog are a victim of their own absurdly high bar, with how this game is being generally received outside of Critics. But I would definitely recommend playing this game, even if you know what happens and have seen a lot of Reviews saying otherwise. I won’t put a number on this, but I can categorically say that the 30 plus hours I spent in that world were worth my time, albeit exhausting, and deserves to be experienced by as many people as possible.

PS5 (2020) - Everything You Need to Know!

So, just like that, Sony has showed us the actual design of the PS5, alongside a ton of games. Now that we know what it will look like, what games it will play and how well it would run those games, here are my thoughts on the PS5. This will be covering everything that Sony has talked about so far and why I’m really looking forward to the PS5.

Grab some snacks, and enjoy! 

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PS5 Design

Number one probably sounds a bit lame because it is really the least important part of a Games Console, which is the Design.

Sony has had two major PS5 events, the first one being in March where Mark Cerny, the PS5’s Lead System Architect, talked about the specs and how the entire system was built. The second big event was just last week, when Sony revealed the full design of the PS5.

We’ve made a number of concepts of how we imagined the PS5 would look. We were also the first ones in the world to reveal an actual photo of the PS5’s DevKit, back in October 2019. I know that there are already a bunch of memes floating around but, I actually really like this Design. It kind of reminds me of Eve, from Wall-E. It’s got that very futuristic and minimalistic look to it, with that Glossy Black middle and then the two Matte White slabs surrounding it. You might remember me saying that the Panda Pixel 2 XL was my favourite colour scheme on any Smartphone and this is pretty much the same. You could say it’s the Playstation 5: Storm-Trooper Edition, I love it!

Compared to the Xbox Series X, the Xbox has a more mature and classic look, which some may prefer. I like both actually, but I just think that the PS5 would look a bit more interesting and futuristic in my Living-Room, whilst the Xbox would just blend in better. Also, a few people have calculated the actual size of the PS5, based on the Disk-Drive size and the USB Port, and it turns out that it’s actually massive. It dwarfs the PS4 Pro, the Xbox One X and even the Xbox Series X. This makes it, I believe, the tallest Games Console ever made.

This is how the PS5 stacks up to its predecessors & main competitor (Credit: The Verge).

Now, the Xbox is more of like a box, so it is fatter than the PS5, which is tall and thin. The good news is that you can indeed use the PS5 on its side as well, which would make it look even weirder. In a way it kind of resembles our latest concept, on its side. But you can use it in any Orientation that you wish, just like you can with the Xbox.

Something that I was really not expecting to see with the PS5, is more than one model. We’ve heard the rumors that Microsoft is planning at least two models of the Xbox Series X, with Lockhart and Scarlett, but unlike the Xbox, the PS5 will have two models that would have identical performance between them. The only difference is that the less expensive one does not have a Blu-Ray Drive in it, which in my opinion also makes it look so much better and so much more uniform.

Here’s something that I want to clarify, just because of how insanely fast that SSD is, you would not be playing any games from the Disk Drive. They would just be there for the sake of you not having to download the actual games. In some cases, maybe Game Developers would store some game assets there, but I don’t even see that being the case as the speed of the Blu-Ray Disk Drive is 27MB/s, compared to the 9000MB/s or so that the SSD inside the PS5 is said to be. So, in this case, the only reason why anyone should get the disk-version of the PS5 is if you really want to play your old PS4 games and you have those games on disk. That’s literally the only reason. 

Now, just a few more things that I want to cover here. I do love the blue LED light-strip that Sony has added towards the top of the PS5, I think it looks gorgeous and we can also see the Ports now. It seems like on the front we get a USB A and a USB C Port, alongside what looks to be two physical Buttons, likely the Power Button and the Disk-Eject Button, on the model that has a Disk Drive. The other one seems to be lacking this second Button. Unfortunately, Sony hasn’t showed us any photos of the sides or the back, so we don’t know what Ports we’ll have there, but at least when it comes to the front, easily accessible Ports, both USB C and USB A are there.

Sony has also released a teaser trailer of the PS5’s UI and they said that it will be completely re-imagined and that no single Pixel will be left untouched. I really do hope that they don’t change it too much as the PS4’s UI was already regarded as the very best. It was easy to navigate and very easy to understand. I just hope that they don’t ruin that for the sake of redesigning it. 

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Controller

The second thing that I’m really looking forward to, is the brand new Controller.

You see, rather than Sony calling this the DualShock 5, they decided to go for a brand new name, the DualSense. There’s actually a very good reason for this name. The main feature of this new Controller, aside from the new Design that I’ll cover in just a minute, is that it has a full Haptic Engine built into it.

We can’t wait to get our hands on this… literally (Credit: PlayStation)

On high-end Smartphones, like the iPhone 11, Pixel 4, Galaxy S20’s and many more, you get a Haptic Engine which gives you the impression that the Buttons that you see on the screen are actual physical Buttons that you can actually feel. The new DualSense controller now does just that. It can apparently mimic the feel of sand, grass, water, dirt and more, immersing you so much more into the game. The Haptic Engine on Smartphones today are already incredible, so having an even better Haptic Engine in a device such as a game Controller should definitely be game-changing.

Sony also added Adaptive Triggers to this Controller, meaning that the Triggers would provide you with a different level of resistance based on what you’re doing in a game. This way, weapons in Modern Warfare for example, would actually feel very different and in combination with the Haptic Engine, they should feel closer to firing a real weapon.

We also have a USB C Port, which not only means that you can use any charger to charge this Controller, but you’ll also be able to use an external Battery Bank. We now have a built-in Microphone, so that you can chat with your friends without the need to plug in Headphones, which of course can still be plugged in using the dedicated 3.5mm Headphone Jack. We still have a built-in Speaker as well. We also have a brand new Magnetic Connector for adding Accessories, possibly that Back Button Attachment, which should be launching at some point.

Finally, there’s the Touchpad in the middle, pretty much the same Buttons as before, just renamed, and then the dual-tone black and white design, which resembles the Design of the actual PS5 Console.

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Accessories

The next thing that I’m really looking forward to, are the Accessories.

Aside from the Console and the Controller, Sony has also teased a few of the Accessories that you can purchase to go with your PS5. There’s a DualSense Charging Station, which allows you to charge two DualSense Controllers at the same time using that proprietary Magnetic Charging Port on the bottom, so no need to fiddle around with cables.

3D Audio has been something that Sony has mentioned a lot with the PS5, so this headset will be the best way to experience it at launch. (Credit: PlayStation)

We also have a brand new HD Camera, which interestingly enough does have two Camera Modules. This makes me think that this would be used for the PSVR Tracking as well, or at least for some 3D functionality to some extent.

We also have one new Wireless Headset, the Pulse 3D, which would be the best way for you to experience 3D Audio on the PS5. Up until now, Sony has had a few models of their own Playstation Headsets, this time it seems like they only want to have one model, which I’m totally for.

Sony is also adding a new Media Remote as an Accessory, which will allow you to control and use the PS5 just like you would use a Smart TV Box. From the looks of it, it seems that it has four Buttons that look like they can be remapped into possibly any App that you want, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime video and so on. 

I’m pretty sure that even more Accessories will be added in the near future. There’s a new PSVR coming out in 2021, which will be a pretty big deal and we’ll likely see more colours of the Controller and possibly even the PS5 itself, not too long into the distant future either. 

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Specs

Right, now onto the good stuff, the Performance. The PS5 is a gigantic leap in Performance over the PS4 and even the PS4 Pro.

In terms of the CPU, it comes with a Desktop Class AMD Processor, based on the Zen2 Architecture. We have an Eight-Core CPU at 3.5GHz, which is just light-years more powerful than the old Jaguar Architecture that we got in the PS4.

With the GPU, we get AMD’s brand new Navi 2 Architecture, which isn’t even out for PC at the moment. The GPU offers 10.28 TFLOPS in GPU Compute Power, making it 5.58 times more powerful than the PS4’s GPU and 2.44 times more powerful than the PS4 Pro’s GPU. If those numbers don’t seem high enough, in reality they’re actually even higher as RDNA with ‘X’ amount of TFLOPS is actually significantly more powerful than what it would be on GCN, with that same amount of TFLOPS.

The SSD is sure to be one of the PS5’s biggest advantages over the Xbox Series X, those numbers are just ridiculous. (Credit: PlayStation)

I’m not going to go into a super amount of detail into the specs as I’ve already covered those in a previous video, but what you need to know for now is that the CPU, in combination with the GPU, will give us true 4K gaming at 60FPS with support of up to 120FPS , as well as 8K support too. Not only that, but we’ll get things such as Ray Tracing support for extremely realistic shadows and insanely detailed 8K textures in games that would look like real-life photos. We’re also going to get 3D Audio on a hardware level, which when combined with that new Pulse 3D Headset, should give you the most immersive audio experience in gaming yet.

Epic Games has demoed their brand new Unreal Engine 5, running in real time on the PS5. Here we saw some of the most amazing graphics ever on a Console or even PC. However, this new Unreal Engine 5, which is launching in 2021, will also run on Xbox and PC as well. So, those graphics are coming to the other platforms, not just the PS5.

Performance-wise, the Xbox Series X is superior to the PS5, there’s been quite a few Developers that are currently working on games for both Consoles that have said that. However, the PS5 is much easier to develop games for and also has a much faster SSD with up to 9GB/s Compressed, when compared to 2.4GB/s that the Xbox Series X will have. The PS4 had a HDD with a Transfer Speed of around 50MB/s, so the SSD inside the PS5 is 180 times faster!

This allows for zero loading times in games and more importantly, the ability to change the game’s Design based on the SSD speed entirely. For example, in Spider-Man you have to take the Metro when you’re fast-traveling. On the PS5, that option could be removed entirely and you could also jump inside of buildings instantly, without having to transition to a loading screen just to load the assets. So, this is where the biggest advantages to the PS5 are, the SSD and the Controller.

And of course, there’s the games!

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Games 

In terms of the games, what you need to know is that all of your PS4 games will work with the PS5.  If you do have the ‘Digital Only’ Version of the PS5, you might have to re-purchase the disk games that you had, Sony hasn’t confirmed this but it is very likely that this will be the case. However, if you have the Blu-Ray Disk Drive version of the PS5, you will be able to just slot in a PS4 disk and play it on the PS5.

Now, aside from just playing PS4 games, most of those PS4 games will also run much better as the PS5 will feature a Boost Mode. Essentially, the PS5’s GPU has a PS4 GPU built into it, this is how it can natively run PS4 games. However, it can also increase the clock-speeds of that GPU above of what the PS4 could do, which is what Boost Mode is. This means that you will get higher Frame-Rates as well as increased Resolution for your PS4 games. If Developers also release a patch, we would even get PS5 specific features that would take advantage of that SSD and that extra Performance.

Ok, but what about PS5 exclusive games? Well, unlike Microsoft, who will not have any exclusive games on the Xbox for at least the next two years, Sony will. In fact, most of the games that they have announced are PS5 exclusives and that’s actually a very good thing. It means that they are all fully optimised for the PS5’s hardware, rather than having to make compromises in order to support older systems as well. The first game that they showed was Gran Turismo 7, with full Ray-Tracing support and running in 4K at 60FPS. At least this is what the video itself was encoded at. The graphics looked good but I wouldn’t necessarily say that they looked completely mind blowing. Still, I’m pretty excited to see this game in person.

‘Horizon 2: Forbidden West’ & ‘Spider-Man: Miles Morales’ were a couple of our personal favourites, although GTA V received a less than welcome reception. (Credit: PlayStation)

We then got a preview of the next Ratchet & Clank game, this looked like a Disney film, it looked like true next-gen. The unique thing about this game is that you can jump into a rift and get instantly teleported into a new world, a new dimension, with all assets being loaded instantly. There’s basically no loading time at all. This is why having this game run on the PS4 would be impossible without having to re-design the game-play element of it. The PS4 would not be able to load those assets that quickly.

GTA 5 was also announced and this seems to be a re-master of the PS4 re-master. The trailer has a ton of dislikes and I can definitely see why. This was already going to be supported on the PS5, thanks to Backwards Compatibility. All this is basically just a patch to increase the Resolution and Frame-Rate with a few high Resolution textures being added. However, it seems to be a much smaller change than what the PS4 version was to the PS3, as Rockstar hasn’t really shown us any side by side comparisons. The trailer that they uploaded was in 1080p, so I do understand why these dislikes are here.

There is a new Spider-Man game coming though, this is called ‘Spider-Man: Miles Morales’, which apparently is a standalone game and not an expansion. It is, however, in the same universe as the 2018 Spider-Man game and apparently this is coming out by the end of the year. It will be one of the first games to be released on the PS5. The graphics looked good but again, they didn’t look as good as the Unreal 5 Engine demo, they just looked to be at a higher Resolution with higher textures and effects quality. Also, for some reason, this trailer was in 4K but only at 30FPS, which I really hope isn’t the case for the final game. 60FPS is really the target for this generation of Consoles and if there’s a game that needs 60FPS a lot, that’s definitely Spider-Man.

Finally, the game that wowed me the most was definitely the new Horizon game - ‘Horizon 2: Forbidden West’ and this is where we can see true next-gen graphics on the PS5. It’s a pretty big leap over the already incredible looking Horizon Zero Dawn, but unfortunately we do not have a release date for that just yet.

Of course, these are just the very first games of this generation. Future games will utilise the hardware even better and they will deliver some even more outstanding graphics, these are very likely to include: GTA 6, Spider-Man 2, the next God of War and so on. 

The PS5 - Finally Revealed!

So…here it is.

We have finally got our first look at the PlayStation 5, nearly 6 months after Xbox first showed us the Xbox Series X at last years’ Game Awards. Sony has certainly kept us waiting and they left it right to the very end of their 75 minute showcase to reveal the final design, although there were a few teasers scattered between the Trailers.

We’ve linked the main event above but if you want to check out the entire livestream, check out the official PlayStation YouTube channel for Gameplay & Trailers for games including:

• GTA V - PS5 Edition

• Spider-Man - Miles Morales

• Gran Turismo 7

• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

• Project Athia

• Stray

• Returnal

• Sackboy

• Destruction Allstars

• Kena

• Goodbye Volcano High

• Oddworld: Soulstorm

• Ghostwire Tokyo

• JETT: The Far Shore

• Godfall

• Solar Ash

• Astro’s Playroom

• Bugsnax

• Demon Souls

• DEATHLOOP

• Resident Evil 8: Village

• Pragmata

• Horizon: Forbidden West

We also saw two separate models of the PS5, a standard model with a 4K Blu-Ray Drive and a Digital Edition, without any form of Disk Drive at all. We still don’t have word on a price for either model or an exact release date, but one thing that we certainly know is that this is going to be big, in every sense of the word.

We’ll have a video up on the channel next week, so make sure you’re Subscribed and have that Notification Bell turned on so you don’t miss it!

PS5 vs Xbox Series X – CPU, GPU, Storage, Games & Price!

INTRO

Sony has finally unveiled the full specs of the PS5. So now that we know the full specs of both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X, which one is actually more powerful? Some of you might have heard that the Xbox Series X is more powerful than the PS5, but there are some ways in which the PS5 significantly tops the Xbox. Without any further ado, here is the full comparison of the PS5 and the Xbox Series X, covering the: CPU, GPU, Memory, Storage, Special Features, Exclusive Games and Price! 

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CPU

Starting off with the CPU, they’re both doing very well here. They both feature a desktop class, AMD Processor that’s based on the AMD Zen 2 architecture. They’re also both 3rd generation AMD Ryzen Processors with 8-Cores, which means that they’re quite similar to the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Processor, which is a very well received CPU. 

It’s nowhere near as powerful as the 3700X, as the clock-speeds are quite a bit lower. We have a 3.5GHz clock speed on the PS5 compared to the 3.8GHz clock speed on the Xbox Series X. From this alone, you would think that the Xbox is quite a bit more powerful in terms of the CPU, which to some extent is true. However, Microsoft has indeed confirmed that if SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading) is enabled, these speeds would drop to 3.6GHz. Sony’s 3.5GHz clock is indeed with Multi-Threading enabled. So, in that case, considering that most applications and games will indeed be taking advantage of Multi-Threading, the difference in CPU power isn’t as high anymore, although the Xbox Series X still has a slight advantage over the PS5.

Now, something that Sony has mentioned is that their system is capable of Turbo Boosting. However, the highest turbo boost clock speed will still be 3.5GHz. This simply means that games will only run at 3.5GHz if they really have to. Otherwise, they will run at a lower clock speed, in order to keep the system cool and also bring the fan noise down. The Xbox Series X will be running at that 3.5GHz clock speed pretty much all the time. So, slightly higher performance on the Xbox, but a lower fan speed on the PS5. 

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GPU

So, what about the GPU? If we look at the raw GPU power, the PS5 has 10.28 TFLOPS, while the Xbox Series X has 12.16 TFLOPS. Now, that’s a 1.88 difference in raw performance, which is actually pretty massive. The PS4, for example, had 1.84 TFLOPS, while the PS4 Pro had 4.2. If you just look at TFLOPS alone, the difference in performance between the PS5 and the Xbox Series X is almost as big as the difference in performance between the PS4 and the PS4 Pro.

However, when Mark Cerny, the PS5’s Lead System Architect presented the PS5 on stage, he did talk about why the PS5 has a lower number of TFLOPS. First, he mentioned how the new GPU architecture that they’re using (RDNA2) has a TFLOP count which is not equal to GCN TFLOPS. Long story short, even if the PS5 looks to be 2.44 times more powerful (GPU wise) than the PS4 Pro, it is actually way more than that as RDNA2 is a much newer architecture.

The difference between the PS5 and the Xbox Series X is almost exactly the same as the full TFLOP count on the PS4, although this was older architecture.

Now, when you calculate the raw performance or the TFLOPS of a GPU, you need to take a few things into account. The biggest ones being the number of CU’s (Compute Units) and the Frequency at which these are running at. So, if we take a look at these, the PS5 has 36 Compute Units running at 2.23GHz, while the Xbox Series X has 52 Compute Units, running at 1.825GHz. Mark Cerny did say that they made that choice because he prefers to prioritise a higher clock speed, to a higher number of Compute Units and in a way, we do agree. Think of Compute Units as a Core in a Processor. Many applications (especially games) do prefer using a lower number of Cores at a higher clock speed, as opposed to a higher number of cores at a lower clock speed. Of course here we’re talking about the GPU and not the CPU, where things are indeed a bit different. So let’s take a look at the Xbox One X and the PS4 Pro.

As most of you may know, the Xbox Series X is noticeably more powerful than the PS4 Pro is, being able to play most third party games at a native 3840x2160 Resolution, in some cases even at 60FPS. While the PS4 Pro can easily do 2560x1440 but it has some serious issues doing anything higher, natively. Also, the Xbox One X had 6 TFLOPS of GPU Compute Power with 40 Compute Units at 1.172GHz, compared to 4.2TFLOPS with 36 Compute Units at 911MHz for the PS4 Pro. You can see how the higher clock speed and those four extra compute units made such a massive difference on the Xbox One X. 

So, Sony might be right about something here. A higher clock speed for the Compute Units is usually preferred to a higher number of Compute Units, at a lower clock speed. Even though on paper, the difference is TFLOPS between the PS5 and the Xbox Series X looks massive, in reality, this might not be as high. However, I would still put my money on the Xbox Series X being slightly more powerful than the PS5, albeit at a lower performance gap than what it looks like on paper. 

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Memory

Moving on to the RAM. Well, both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X now have 16GB of GDDR6 Memory, which is not RAM but part of it will be used as RAM for the system, while the rest will be used in games, as Video Memory. They both deal with this approach quite differently.

The PS5 uses 16GB of GDDR6 Memory, on a 256-bit Memory Interface, running at 448GB/s, which is insanely fast. Just to give you guys an idea, the original PS4 had 8GB of GDDR5 Memory on a 256-bit Memory Interface while running at 176GB/s, the PS4 Pro had a 217.6GB/s Bandwidth. Sony hasn’t yet said how much of this 16GB Pool would be available to developers, but it is expected to remain the same as before, with 3.5GB used by the OS and the rest, 12.5GB in this case, available for developers.

On Microsoft’s end, things are quite a bit different. Even though we have the same 16 GB GDDR6 Memory, we have a 320-bit Memory Interface, compared to 256-bit on the PS5, this Memory is split into two chunks. One chunk is 10GB in size, with a Bandwidth of 560GB/s, which is much higher than on the PS5, while the other chunk is 6GB in size, with a Bandwidth of 336GB/s, which is noticeably lower than on the PS5. Microsoft said that they did this because they wanted developers to have access to some really fast GPU memory, the CPU doesn’t need that much fast memory and neither does the OS. The OS will be using 2.5GB of 336GB/s memory, which means that in a game, the GPU will have access to 10GB of 560GB/s Memory and the CPU will get 3.5GB of 336GB/s Memory. 

If you do the average of 560GB/s and 336GB/s, you actually get 448GB, which is the same memory bandwidth that the PS5 has. As the APU, which includes both the CPU and the GPU, are both made by AMD, it makes sense for the memory to be extremely similar. It seems like Microsoft has just split that in a different way, compared to Sony. 

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Storage

Something that is indeed quite different, is Storage. Both the Xbox Series X and the PS5 have an SSD now, which is light years ahead of the HDD that we had in the current generation. The fastest m.2 Flash Modules that we have right now, are around 3-3.5GB/s in speed. However, the PS5’s custom made Flash Module has a speed of 5.5GB/s. That’s absolutely insane! This is essentially 110 times faster than the PS4 Pro’s traditional HDD. 

The Xbox Series X has a 2.4GB/s module, which while still 50 times faster that the Xbox One’s drive, is considerably slower than the PS5’s drive. On top of this, Sony has said that the PS5’s internal storage is so fast, that it can technically be used as RAM, 5.5GB/s is almost as fast as DDR3 RAM which, for a 1066MHz Memory, is around 8.5GB/s in speed. Microsoft has also addressed this possibility, but realistically Sony has a much bigger advantage here, that is, if developers do make full use of it.

Fun fact, if you take a look at Star Citizen, which is a PC exclusive game, this game makes full use of m.2 Flash Modules. If you have an m.2 Drive, you can get even 30fps higher in the game, compared to using a standard HDD, so this is a good example were a faster Storage can indeed directly impact the FPS in a game.

An old idea for a new generation (Credit: Xbox)

Another area in which the PS5 excels when it comes to Storage, is in terms of storage expansion. The Xbox Series X has a 1TB Internal Drive. The PS5 could have anywhere between 800GB to 1TB, but the usable capacity is likely to be around 825GB, like we’ve seen in Mark Cerny’s presentation.  However, while the Xbox Series X will feature these proprietary 1TB drives that you can just slot in the back and expand the Storage, the PS5 will support any m.2 Module that you can buy off of Amazon (or elsewhere), that has at least 5.5GB/s in speed. They will be releasing a list of all supported models, but that’s great because it means that we’ll get a much higher selection compared to the Xbox and we can even get higher capacity drivers if we want. 

However, while the PS5’s m.2 Expansion Modules will be replacing the Internal Drive, the Xbox module will be adding to that Internal Storage. On top of this, Microsoft has confirmed that external HDD’s are still supported, for the previous generation games. Sony hasn’t talked about supporting external HDD’s just yet, but it is likely that they will be doing something quite similar.

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Special Features

Let's summarise what we’ve said so far. CPU wise, the Xbox is slightly more powerful. GPU wise, the Xbox is again looking to me more powerful but Storage Wise, the PS5 has more than double the performance. Now we have the Special Features, the things that make each console unique.

Both consoles will indeed be supporting previous generation games, so both will be Backwards Compatible. But, while the PS5 will only be supporting PS4 games and not even all of them at this point, the Xbox Series X will be supporting Xbox One games, Xbox 360 Games and even some original Xbox games. So if you care about playing your entire library of old games, the Xbox is a much better choice. Sony does have Playstation Now, which does support some PS3 games, but the catalogue just doesn’t compare to what Microsoft is offering. 

Both consoles will also support Ray Tracing, which will make Reflections, Shadows and Lightning look significantly better than what we have now.  

This time, 3D Audio is built into the hardware to make it the new standard.

An area in which Sony should excel, is in terms of Audio. Mark Cerny  did talk a lot about their new Tempest Engine, and how they will be achieving 3D Audio thanks to a dedicated hardware engine. Remember the dedicated Playstation Platinum headphones do support 3D audio on the PS4, however with this new hardware based engine, every pair of headphones will support 3D Audio on the PS5. Sony is even working on bringing this to TV Speakers and Soundbars as well.

While the Controller on the Xbox Series X looks mostly the same as on the Xbox One X, with the exception of a share button, the PS5 controller is said to be adding a full display as well as Haptic Feedback, which will allow you to feel when you’re driving on asphalt or grass or dirt. Apparently, this is one of the best features of the PS5, according to people that have actually tried it. But, Microsoft has indeed introduced a Dynamic Latency input. By significantly reducing the input lag from the Controller, this could make the Xbox the better choice for competitive gaming.

Speaking of this, both consoles will be supporting 120z output, so games will be able to run in up to 120fps, as well as 8K Resolution, but this will be a Dynamic Resolution while 4K would be Native this time. 

Both consoles will also be supporting different methods of Compression for games, so games will actually take up less space than they do now. On top of this, Sony has confirmed that you will be able to uninstall different parts of a game, such as the campaign after you’ve finished it, and then install the multiplayer right after. 

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Exclusive Games 

Speaking of games, there is a very big difference between the two, in terms of exclusives. This is because Microsoft has confirmed that there will be no exclusive games on the Xbox Series X for the first two years, as all Xbox Series X games will be required to also work on the Xbox One series of consoles. Unfortunately, this does mean that developers will be severely held back in terms of what they can achieve, at least for the first 2 years. If you’re not sure why we’re saying this, we made a full video in which we explained why this is a real issue, be sure to check that out.

The PS5 on the other hand, while it will indeed have some PS4 games, like ‘The Last of Us 2’, that will also work on the PS5, it will indeed have exclusive PS5 games that will only work on the PS5 and not the PS4. Because of this, we might see true next-gen games on the PS5 first.

Microsoft did show us a gameplay demo of Gears 5 which compared to the Xbox One X, looked barely any different on the Series X. However, they did show us Hellblade 2, which was absolutely mind-blowing in terms of Graphics, this did indeed look like a truly next generation game. This is said to be coming only to the Series X and PC but we don’t know when this will be exactly.

So there is a chance that this will be the first game that was developed with just the Series X in mind and not Xbox One, the main reason why it can look so good. This is what you can expect from games that have indeed been developed for the next-gen hardware, compared to Gears 5 for example, which looks the same as on the current generation, just with better texture detail and longer rendering distances. 

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Price 

Credit: PSErebus

And finally, we have the price. Neither Sony or Microsoft have revealed the prices yet.  However, we have had some leaks that put the PS5 at around $500 (£450 in the UK), making the PS5 $100 more than the PS4 Pro. 

Microsoft on the other hand, is said to have two models of the Xbox, a low end model and the high end model that we’ve all seen. The low end model is said to be less expensive than the PS5, while the high end model is said to be more expensive. I would expect the high end to cost around $580-$600, while the low end should be around $300-$400. 

Now, some of you might think that paying this much for a console is just ridiculous, but you would be surprised. A Console would last you for six to seven years. A Smartphone, which now usually costs close to $1000 (or more), is something that most people replace every two years. So, in six years time, you would’ve spent $3000 on smartphones, compared to $600 on a new console. This is a pretty massive difference.

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Conclusion

So, in the end, which one is the better console? Well, the Xbox Series X seems to win in terms of CPU and GPU performance. The PS5 is more balanced when it comes to System Memory and it is significantly faster when it comes to the Storage, plus it also supports third-party SSD Modules. The PS5 supports 3D Audio and Haptic Feedback on the Controller, while the Xbox Series X supports a lower latency and significantly more previous gen games, while also offering two models of the console. When it comes to exclusives, Sony seems to have the upper hand, at least for the first few years.

PS5 (2020) – 25 Things You Didn’t Know!

INTRO 

The Playstation 5 has finally been revealed by Sony! Well, some of it, anyway. Mark Cerny, the lead system architect for both the PS4 and the PS5, has gone on stage for almost an entire hour and has talked very in-depth, just the way we like it, about all the main specification of the PS5. So, without any further ado, here are 25 interesting facts that you might not have known about the PS5!

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1) World’s Fastest SSD

At Number One, the PS4 came with a traditional HDD. The PS5 now comes with an SSD. But this is not your usual SSD. This is actually a custom SSD module made by Sony, that is ridiculously fast. It turns out that this SSD module that Sony custom made for the PS5 is actually the fastest SSD module in the world right now!

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2) 110 Times Faster

Ok, but how fast is this internal storage of the PS5? The PS4 had a traditional HDD, that had around 50MB/s transfer speeds. The PS5 now uses this brand new Custom SSD, which as transfer speeds of 5.5GB/s (or 5500MB/s), which makes it 110 times faster! 

A top of the line MacBook Pro, iMac Pro or Mac Pro, which are known to have the fastest SSD modules on the planet right now, have around 3.5GB/s transfer speeds. The PS5 has 5.5 GB/s, a massive improvement over even the fastest SSD modules out right now. But, how is this even possible? Well, the PS5 is now taking full use of the brand new PCIe 4 standard, this is how it can achieve these incredible speeds.

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3) Mark Cerny

The guy that was on the stage and talked about the specs of the PS5 and how the entire system works, is none other than Mark Cerny himself. Mark Cerny was the lead system architect for the PS4. He was the main reason as to why the PS4 was so successful when compared to the PS3. The PS3 had this very complex architecture with the Cell Processor, that developers found extremely difficult to develop games for. 

The PS4 on the other hand, not only had significantly more power than even its competitor, the Xbox One, but it had a more traditional PC like architecture and it was so much easier for developers to take full advantage of it. All of this was thanks to Mark Cerny.

He was not only responsible for the PS4’s success, he was also heavily involved in the development of some very well known 1st party PS4 titles, such as Ratchet and Clank, Crash Bandicoot, Uncharted Drake’s Fortune, God of War 3, Killzone 3, Knack, The Last Guardian, Knack 2, Spider-Man, Death Stranding and so many more.  Not only that, but as an American, he’s also fluent in Japanese and moved to Japan in the 80’s and 90’s.  

He’s given tours of their game development studios to Steven Spielberg and Michael Jackson and he’s well known for developing the “Cerny Method’, this is where developers try to complete just a small portion of the game in pre-production fully and from there they can decide if the whole game is worth taking any further. Now, Mark Cerny has also been directly involved with the PS5’s development by being the lead system architect.

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4) Massive Freedom for Developers

Since this new SSD is so insanely fast, it brings some massive freedom for developers. For example, because of how slow the HDD was, in some cases developers had to implement a lift, or a very long staircase, or a subway system or something that would allow the game to load a new part of the world or scene in the background. Masking loading times with a subway ride would no longer be required so developers can now design their games much more freely.

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5) SSD as RAM 

We knew it was going to be fast, but this was totally unprecedented.

Because of that insane 5.5GB/s speed, the PS5 can actually use the SSD as RAM (to some extent) and offload some of the assets onto it, keeping the RAM free for the most important assets.  But, how much faster is the actual RAM?

Well, DDR1 memory at 266MHz is around 2.1GBs. DDR2 Memory at 533MHz is 4.2GB/s. DDR3 memory at 1066MHz is 8.5GB/s and DDR4 memory at 2133MHz is 17GB/s. So this SSD, while still nowhere near the speed of RAM, is still close in performance to DDR3 memory, which is still very impressive. 

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6) Kraken Compressions

Mark Cerny did mention that they’re using something called Kraken Compression to reduce the size of the games by 10%. Not only that, but he also mentioned, last year, that the PS5 will allow you to install or uninstall specific portions of the game. For example, in a game like Modern Warfare, you will be able to just install the campaign and then uninstall it once you’ve finished playing it, then you can install the Multiplayer and so on. This will save a ton of space by letting the user install just what he or she wants, in a game. 

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7) SSD Size 

We know that this SSD is fast but how big is it? Well, Mark Cerny hasn’t really said that but, in a slide from yesterday’s livestream, he did mention 825GB as an example for the size. This points to a 1TB SSD, but the usable capacity for developers would indeed be smaller, at around 825GB, due to formatting and the space that the OS will require. 

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8) SSD Expansion

The good news is that you will actually be able to expand  this 1TB of internal storage in a pretty genius way. While Microsoft will be selling their own 1TB Proprietary SSD modules for the Xbox Series X, Sony will actually allow you to install any m.2 Drive that you can buy off of Amazon. However, they will need to be at least as fast as the internal storage, and they will need to be PCIe 4 modules. At the moment, there are a few of these drives but the speed varies. Mark Cerny did mention that we should wait until manufacturers start producing these drives, but once they do, you would be able to buy any 3rd party drive as long as it matches the 5.5GB/s speed of the PS5 SSD.

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9) Weaker than Xbox Series X?

Speaking of the Xbox Series X, now that we know the GPU power of the PS5 (10.28 TFLOPS), it seems like it is noticeably weaker than the Xbox Series X (12 TFLOPS). However, that might not necessarily be the case, or at least not to the extent that it seems. 

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10) CU & Clock-Speeds 

The PS5 has 36 CU’s (compute units) at 2.23GHz. The Xbox Series X has 52CU at 1.82 GHz. Mark Cerny has said that he always prefers a higher clock speed, reason why they decided to go for a lower number of CU, but at the much higher clock speed. We do believe that he does have a very valid point here. 

Think of CU as the cores of a CPU, as an analogy. While some applications, like 3D rendering for example, do prefer a high number of cores at a lower clock speed, games in general prefer a lower number of cores but at a much higher clock speed. Usually games don’t need more than 4 cores. Now this is a GPU not a CPU, so things are quite a bit different but, depending on how the games are optimised, a higher clock speed might be preferred in most cases, to a higher number of compute units. So, while the Xbox Series X does look much more powerful, the gap might be much smaller than it looks. 

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11) Xbox Series X SSD

Will less, turn out to be more?

Also, the SSD speed for the Xbox Series X is 2.4GB/s which while still fast, the PS5 has more than twice the speed in their SSD, which could not only mean that games will load noticeably faster on the PS5 but like we mentioned before, developers can also use the SSD on the PS5 as RAM, to some extent. This is quite a bit more difficult to do on the Xbox. 

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12) Faster CPU 

CPU wise, we finally know the frequency. We now have an AMD CPU, a Ryzen 3rd gen, based on AMD’s Zen 2 x86-64 architecture. Also, we have 8 cores at 3.5GHz. While this is a pretty big improvement over the PS4’s 1.6GHz 8-core AMD Jaguar processor, the Xbox Series X does indeed have a clear advantage in the CPU department, thanks to a 3.8GHz processor, compared to 3.5GHz on the PS5. 

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13) RDNA2 

But, the PS5 does indeed come with AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture (same as the Xbox), which isn’t even out yet for PC. This is AMD’s most advanced GPU architecture, which should hit stores by the end of this year. 

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14) Legacy Modes 

Something pretty awesome in terms of the PS5, are the Legacy Modes. Essentially, the PS5’s GPU can turn off some of the Compute Units and the Clock Speeds, in order to make it essentially identical to a PS4 & PS4 Pro. This means that many PS4 games will be natively supported at launch.

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15) Backwards Compatibility 

Speaking of this, Mark Cerny said that they tested the top 100 PS4 games and most of them were playable on the PS5, at launch. Without any updates at all required by the developers. That is great, however it does seem like not all the games will work, but a good majority of them should. Of course, if developers do release updates to their games, PS4 games will run at an even higher Resolution and Frame-Rate on the PS5 hardware. 

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16) Ray Tracing

Just one example of what RTX will bring to Next-Gen Consoles.

Probably one of the biggest new features of the PS5 will be Ray-Tracing. Long story short, this will allow for some significantly improved Lightning, Shadows, Reflections and even Audio will be ray-traced. All of this would make the Graphics and the sound look way more realistic than anything we’ve seen up until this point. 

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17) Video Memory 

Video Memory is also a very important aspect of the next generation of consoles. Mark Cerny has now confirmed that the PS5 will come with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, up from the 8GB of GDDR5 memory that we had on the PS4. Some of this is used for the OS as RAM, some for games and we’ll go through this and how it comes with the Xbox Series X, in a future video. Lots of interesting things to cover there so do make sure that you’re subscribed. 

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18) Memory Bandwidth 

Aside from the amount of Video Memory itself, the Memory Bandwidth is also extremely important. We now have 448GB/s of bandwidth, up from 176GB/s, which is a gigantic upgrade. 

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19) Advanced API’s and Tools

Sony will be giving developers a few API’s and tools that will make a big impact on their games. We have a new Geometry Engine, we have Primitive Shaders, which are essentially a heavily improved version of the Shaders that we have now. Long story short, a higher resolution on 3D textures (rocks and bumps in roads etc). These will look much more realistic on the PS5. Primitive Shaders aren’t something that developers need to use out of the gate, but if they choose to, they can take full advantage of them and heavily improve the realism in games. 

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20) Cooling System 

Now, one of the mean new features of the PS5, will be its cooling system. We’ve all seen those insane looking Dev-Kits, we were actually the first to reveal the 1st image of an actual Dev-Kit that got sent to us. 

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21) Design

Mark Cerny did say that they have made a very special cooling system, and thanks to the many reports that we’ve seen that claimed that the cooling system is an extremely expensive component for Sony, it is quite likely we would see a design similar to the DevKit or at least the 2nd leak that we got. This could quite possibly be something that implements a V-shaped cooling system and still has a modern design.

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22) Tempest Engine 

We got a taste of 3D Audio with the PS4, but Sony are really pushing the boat out for the PS5

Mark Cerny did indeed talk a lot about their new Tempest Engine. Essentially, what this is, is a single Compute Unit dedicated for the new Audio Engine. We would be getting 3D Audio at the hardware level. This means, that no matter what headphones you have, you would be getting 3D audio, just like you used to on the PS4 with Sony’s 1st party 3D headphones. Not only that, but Sony is currently working on optimising the Tempest Engine for speakers as well as sound-bars, in order to be able to provide 3D audio, even if you’re not wearing headphones. This is unfortunately much more difficult to do, but to some extent at least, it is doable. 

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23) Release Date 

If you’re wondering when the PS5 is getting released, this will indeed be by the end of the year. We have had many leaks saying that the actual release date would be in mid-November. 

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24) Price

Price-wise Sony hasn’t said anything about the PS5, but this is expected to cost $500 in the US.

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25) Selling at a Loss 

However, because of the sheer amount of high end components that Sony is packing into the PS5, we’ve seen reports that they are really struggling with the price. In fact, Sony might even have to sell the PS5 at a loss at first, in order to sell it at that $500 price point that many consumers would buy. They will be making their revenue back from the actual sales of games but, when it comes to the actual hardware, they might be at a loss.

Where is the PS5?

To say that there has been a lot of speculation about the upcoming PS5 would be a huge understatement. The amount of Leaks & Rumors have now got to a point where it is becoming very difficult to make sense of any of it. Our alliances are very split in the office but I have always leaned towards Playstation. So, since it’s been 7 years (and a few days) since Sony announced the PS4, I decided to try and get my head around just what is going on with the PS5.

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Announcement Dates

In some of our previous videos, we have discussed the idea of a February 5th announcement, as per the PSErebus leaks, and a live announcement on 29th February. Most of the gaming community seemed to think that this late February announcement would materialise and are still hopeful. We are very quickly running out of February and there are no reports of any press invites being sent out (as far as we know). Plus, given the recent Coronavirus outbreak, it would be easy to understand why Sony would not want to have a large gathering of its international workforce and journalists in a densely populated place such as New York, where this was rumoured to be taking place.

So what is the alternative?

Are the days of live reveals over?

Well, an idea which has been floated about recently has been a pre-recorded ‘State of Play’-esque style of announcement. Personally, I enjoy the buzz and live reaction of new consoles & games being announced live. One of my personal favourites was the ‘God of War’ reveal at E3 2016, it was just very over the top, unexpected and it gave me goosebumps. I think it would certainly lose some of the magic if the PS5 were to be announced in a pre-recorded trailer, but circumstances dictate that this is the safest option. Additionally, as Xbox revealed the Series X with an ad at the 2019 Game Awards, it wouldn’t be that much of a shock to anyone if Sony took a similar approach, regardless of the external factors.

Something that we need to bear in mind is that the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) kicks off on 16th March. They have already pulled out of this event (as well as Pax East), citing Coronavirus concerns. However, it will be in Sony’s interest to publicly announce the PS5 before this event, regardless of attendance, as they would risk an immense amount of leaks given how much these developers know and will come to know. Moreover, Sony have indicated, via an earnings call between Hiroki Totoki (Chief Financial Officer) and investors, that they would like to stick to a similar timeline to that of the PS4 launch (which was announced on 21st February, 2013).

So, from all of this information we can be fairly certain that an announcement is imminent, but I would be surprised if we got anything this month. But Sony are more than welcome to do so. We are also forgetting that Microsoft didn’t formally announce the Xbox One until May 2013 for a November release in that year, so even if it was March before we saw the PS5, we would actually on an earlier timeline than the previous console generation.

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Release Date

We know that Sony plans to release the PS5 in ‘Holiday 2020’, so somewhere between September and December this year. Granted, that is still a pretty big window and is intentionally vague. From a production perspective, it gives them some wiggle room to adjust for demand. From a market perspective, they can wait for Xbox to blink first.

We’ve known the release window for the PS5 since October 2019

The PS4 launched on November 15th, 2013. It would be logical to think that the PS5 would launch at a similar time and be marketed as the must-have buy this Christmas. If they launch in October, they would realistically fall outside that window and if they launch in December, customers might not get their units in time. PSErebus, a prominent Twitter leaker who has a good track record, predicted a November 20th release date, which I would be inclined to say is at least very close.

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Conclusion

I am of the opinion that Sony will release information when they are ready and we have to be patient. Unlike Microsoft, who have other platforms outside of Xbox where they generate huge revenue (primarily ‘Windows’), the Playstation is by far Sony’s biggest earner. They spun off their struggling computer brand ‘Vaio’ into its own individual entity in 2014, they don’t make much money from Smartphones or TV’s and they have gone through several restructurings in the past decade or so. 

The next biggest division within Sony is Cameras, but there is too much pressure for the PS5 to do well. If it does not perform to expectations, Sony could be in some serious hot water with its investors. The campaign for the PS5 has to be perfect from their point of view and there are a few major risks to mitigate (namely Coronavirus and the rumoured high production cost).

This may well be the last generation of the traditional hardware-based consoles so I just want the PS5 to be the best that it can possibly be, if that means waiting a little longer to see it, then fair enough.

PS5 & Xbox Series X – The Next Generation of Games!

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Welcome back to the ultimate comparison between the PS5 and the Xbox Series X, based on everything that we know so far. We uploaded PART 1 of this comparison back in January. In that video, we talked about the CPU differences, the GPU, the Resolution, the Frame-Rate and the in-game Graphics.

This is PART 2 of that comparison, and here we will be covering the RAM, the SSD  and any Special Features that both of these consoles will come with, alongside any other recent leaks since our last video.

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It seems like the Xbox Series X will be a bit more powerful than the PS5. The CPU will be pretty much identical between the two, but the GPU will be slightly more powerful on the Xbox. The Series X would have around 12.2 TFLOPS of raw GPU performance, compared to around 9.2 TFLOPS on the PS5. These are the calculations that DigitalFoundry made based on the recent AMD APU leaks from a few weeks prior, this will very likely be the case with the final unit. 

However, this is mostly because Microsoft will have two models of the Xbox, the low-end ‘Lockhart’ and the high-end ‘Scarlett’ (which will be more expensive than the PS5).

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RAM

The Xbox Series X may dedicate more of its RAM to the OS than the PS5, but there’s still plenty left for developers to use.

Unlike PC’s where we have separate Video Memory (GDDR) and System Memory (DDR), consoles only have Video Memory, which the Operating System (OS) gets to use a chunk of. For example, on the PS4 Pro, we have 8GB of GDDR5 memory, out of which only 1GB is allocated to the OS, while the remaining 7GB are used by games. On the Xbox One X, we have 12GB of GDDR5 memory, out of which 3GB are used for the OS and 9GB are usable by developers, in games. When it comes to next-gen, both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X are said to come with 24GB of GDDR6 memory. 

When it comes to how much of this 24GB of GDDR5 memory would be dedicated to the OS, and how much can actually be used by developers, we don’t yet know. It really depends on how both companies approach their new OS on the next-gen consoles. If both companies follow a similar approach to the PS4 and the Xbox One, then Sony should have less memory dedicated to the OS, compared to Microsoft. So developers should have more to play with, in terms of video memory, with the PS5. 

In terms of the bandwidth, the Xbox Series X is said to have 560GB/s vs around 512GB/s on the PS5. 

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Storage

Moving on to the storage, this will actually be the third massive change that the next-gen consoles will be getting, aside from the new CPU and GPU.

The current generation of consoles use plain old HDD’s. Yes, 5400RPM Hard-Drives, which we don’t really even see in laptops anymore, unless you’re looking at the lowest entry models. The HDD inside the current generation consoles only reach speeds of around 50-75MB/s, which is very slow. SSD’s, on the other hand, can reach speeds of up to 550MB/s but are limited by the SATA connector. While m.2 based Flash Storage can reach speeds of more than 3500MB/s. 

Luckily, both Sony & Microsoft have confirmed that the next-gen consoles will both be using Flash Storage. Yes, not even SATA based SSD’s, but m.2 based Flash modules that can reach some insane speeds.

Mark Cerny, the Lead System Architect for the PS5, said in a recent interview with ‘The Wired’, that the PS5 will have a storage module that has higher bandwidth than any SSD’s available on PC’s at the moment, which is very interesting. In that famous Spider-Man game demo, a scene that took 15 seconds to load on a PS4 Pro, only took 0.8 seconds with the PS5’s new storage (18.75 times faster). However, if we take the PS4 Pro’s HDD speed, which is about 75MB/s, and multiply that by 18.75, we get 1406MB/s. This is much faster than a SATA based SSD, so this is indeed an NVMe Flash Module, but nowhere near as fast as other flash modules that can reach speeds of over 3500MB/s. Still, it’s a massive improvement over what we currently have now.

Credit: Takashi Mochizuki

In another Spider-Man demo, Sony showed how fast you can actually swing through New York on the PS5 version of the game compared to the PS4 Pro version of the game. The PS4 Pro version ends up freezing once Spidey reaches a certain speed as the HDD simply cannot load the game assets fast enough, while the PS5’s Flash module has zero problems. So, with this new type of storage, not only will the games load up pretty much instantly, you will also be able to achieve much higher speeds in games where…you know…speed is important. For example, games such as Gran Turismo, Wipeout, or any other games that feature a ton of fast moving scenes, will feel so much more immersive with the next-gen consoles. Especially once you keep in mind that 60fps would be the standard with the next gen consoles and both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X will also support 120Hz output. 

We have seen a few reports that Samsung would be supplying Sony with their NVMe drives, to be used in the PS5.  Samsung did have an internal presentation and one slide did get leaked. We can see that they’re teasing their new generation of NVMe Flash modules that would apparently be used in 2020 consoles. We can also see how the system boot time drops from 49 seconds to around 9 seconds, this would be 5.44 times faster, which looks to be quite low for a Flash module.

So then why did Sony say that their drivers will have a higher bandwidth than SSD’s modules in PC’s today? Well, they were either referring to SATA based SSD where the bandwidth is indeed limited by the SATA connector or they might have been referring to the fact that their drivers would be using PCIe 4.0. This is something that AMD’s current Zen 2 platform supports and that’s where we’ve also first seen PCIe 4 introduced to the market.

Microsoft will also be doing something similar, they talked about this when they first unveiled Project Scarlett.  It will feature custom made Flash storage, something miles over what we currently have. A recent leak gives us a bit more insight into the Xbox Series X’s Flash module. A former Phison employee posted a description of his former job, on LinkedIn and it seems like we was working on a specific DRAM-less controller for the Flash module inside the Xbox Series X.

Check out @zoneofconcepts on Instagram for more behind the scenes content on our videos.

Judging by these specs, the Xbox Series X will only be able to achieve PCIe 3.0 speeds, rather than the 4.0 speeds that Sony are working towards. But, it’s extremely unlikely that Sony will be using drives with read speeds of 6500MB. So even if Sony will indeed support higher bandwidth storage, the Flash modules inside both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X will likely be very similar. 

Something pretty cool that you’ll be able to do storage-wise on the PS5, is that you will be able to uninstall certain aspects of the game. So games will be made in such a way so that if you want to only install the campaign, you can do that and then once you’ve finished it, you can uninstall it and install the multiplayer part of the game. This will let you save up a ton of storage. Not only that, but the games themselves will actually occupy less. On the current generation of consoles, because of how slow the HDD’s are, a lot of the games actually had to store multiple copies of textures so that the HDD could load the data from them faster. This won’t be required anymore, with the next gen consoles and so games, at least at launch, will occupy less.

We’ve heard a lot about Sony’s production costs and how material scarcity may end up affecting the RRP, what price do you think the PS5 will launch at?

And speaking of launch, PSErebus (a leaker who’s been very accurate in the past) stated that the PS5 will come with a 2TB SSD and a retail price of $500, 500 euros or £450. That’s pretty impressive! If Sony does indeed ship the PS5 with 2TB of storage, then this would be the dream. We don’t know anything in terms of the storage on the Xbox Series X just yet, but considering that the Series X is expected to cost more, around $600 for the high-end model, it should come with at least as much storage as the PS5 does.

Sony has confirmed that PS5 games will ship on new 100GB Blu-Ray disks and yes, for those of you who are wondering, Blu-Ray drivers are much slower than even a regular HDD, with read speeds of just around 25MB/s. So, with the PS5 and Xbox Series X, the games would not be run from the Blu-Ray disks anymore The only use case for the Blu-Ray disks would be to copy the game direct to your console, as opposed to downloading it from the online store. This is useful if your internet connection is slow and you will also be able to sell the games this way. The Blu-Ray drive will still be required to be inserted into the console, for licensing purposes. 

Since the next-gen consoles will rely so much on the internal storage, even games will make full use of this faster storage by enabling a seamless open-world with no loading times at all,  both consoles may heavily limit the use of external storage use. At the moment, you can plug in an external HDD or SSD and expand the internal storage that way. It’s a pretty easy and straight-forward process.  However, with next-gen, it’s very likely that we would either have First-Party storage modules, or the Third-Party external storage options would need to surpass a certain speed threshold in order for them to be used. Our guess is that only external SSD and m.2 drives will be usable.

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Special Features

Finally, the last thing that we want to cover here, is the special features that both of these consoles will have.

RTX is going to be a real game-changer for next-gen consoles and thankfully, it will be on both.

Both Sony and Microsoft have confirmed that the next gen consoles will support hardware based Ray-Tracing. In case you don’t know that Ray-Tracing is, it is pretty much the key selling feature of Nvidia’s RTX series of GPU’s. Real-Time Ray tracing is the most realistic way of casting shadows and reflections in games. This is because, unlike regular reflection and shadow mapping which are always fixed, Ray Tracing involves each light ray being individually cast and reflected to light up a scene, resulting in extremely photo-realistic environments. This might not sound like much but it will make a massive difference in-game.

Additionally, each of the consoles will have some unique features to them. The Xbox Series X will have Microsoft’s Project xCloud, which will essentially turn your Xbox into a server that you’ll be able to access from pretty much any device and play your games, a little like Playstation Remote. Another new feature of the Xbox will be a Windows Mode, according to some recent leaks. This would allow you to access Steam and the Epic Games Store and play PC games directly from there. As Mouse & Keyboard are fully supported, the Xbox Series X will be closer to a PC than a console.  Also, Microsoft has already confirmed that all the Series X “Exclusives” will also work on PC, so the Series X won’t have any console exclusives games. That’s pretty much it in terms of the Xbox. Microsoft hasn’t really talked about any other new and exclusive features. On the PS5 side however, we do get quite a few unique features.

We can already get 3D Audio on the PS4, how much better will it be on the PS5?

For one, Sony has teased 3D Audio quite a lot. They said that this will make a massive difference as to how games are perceived and that the PS5 will even have a hardware based 3D Audio Chip that will handle all the 3D Audio processing. Now, there are a few First-Party headphones from Sony,  which do support 3D audio on the PS4 already and we happen to own a pair. They’re very good, but from the looks of it, this 3D Audio chip should take audio to the next level. Something else that Sony will have is next-gen haptics on the controller itself. Sony has already confirmed that the haptics in the new controller will be so good, that you will be able to feel the surface that a car in a game is driving on. So you will be able to feel the difference between asphalt, dirt, grass and so on. And lastly, the PS5 will support both the current PSVR as well as the upcoming PSVR 2. Microsoft has already confirmed that they won’t be doing a VR headset for the Xbox Series X anytime soon, as Phil Spencer himself, the head of Xbox, said - “nobody’s asking for VR”. 

One last key thing to mention here is that both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X will support Backwards Compatibility in games. The PS5 supporting PS4 games with rumors of this going all of the way back to the PS1. While the Xbox Series X will support Xbox One games as well as Xbox 360 games.

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Conclusion

In the end, both consoles are going to be light years ahead of even the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X so no matter which one you get, you’ll be extremely happy. The Xbox will offer slightly better specs and PC game compatibility, while the PS5 will offer things such as Haptic Rumble on the controller and VR support. Also, Microsoft will be offering two models of the Xbox, a low-end and a high-end, while Sony will only offer one, the PS5. 

Phil Spencer might think the console war with Sony is over, but who’s he kidding? 

Which one are you getting?

PS5 - MAJOR Leaks Update - Price, Graphics and more!

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Over the past couple of months we have done a couple of videos and articles on the upcoming PS5 from Sony.

A couple of weeks ago we did a video and article surrounding the PS5 Controller and everything we knew about it, as there had been quite a few leaks regarding it. Then a couple of weeks before that we did a massive video and article covering an exclusive picture that we received of the PS5 developers kit. This was a never seen before image and it basically showing the PS5 that we had seen in previous patents, and we actually got picked up by quite a few tech website thanks to this.

But what will we be covering in this video and article? Well, we have a ton of major updates to cover, from insane spec updates, to some more controller leaks and a direct comparison between the PS5 and Xbox 2. So get those snacks ready and here’s the latest updates on the PS5!

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SPECS

The PS5 will have some truly next generation graphics, 4K at up to 120fps and even 8K at 30fps, these have both been officially confirmed by Sony so they’re not even leaks anymore. 

But one of the main upgrades to the PS5, and this is something that some of you might be familiar with would be the HDD. You see, rather than the PS5 using a traditional HDD, like we’ve had in pretty much all modern consoles, both the PS5 and the Xbox 2 will be using SSD’s (Solid State Drives). This is very similar to what you find in modern laptops as SSD’s are up to 10 times faster than HDD’s, offering speeds of around 500MB/s from the standard 50MB/s that a HDD offers.

NVMe or PCIe flash storages are usually found soldered to the motherboard as seen in the image above

However, the PS5 will be using something even more powerful than a SATA based SSD. Sony did say that they’ve developed a custom storage option that would offer speeds of up to 19 times higher of what the HDD inside the PS4 could achieve. So 19 times 50 is 950MB/s which is pretty much in the territory of NVMe and PCIe based Flash Storage. These are flash modules that are soldered onto the motherboard, that offer much much higher speeds that what a SATA based SSD would be able to offer, which is always limited to between 500 and 550MB/s. Now if you do get a high end laptop that’s aimed at creatives today, such as a Dell XPS or the MacBook Pro, these have read and write speeds of well over 2GB/s. So while the PS5 won’t have speeds as high as a high end laptop’s storage has, it will still be much faster than the HDD inside the PS4 was.

Also, Sony did showcase a demo of Spiderman running on the PS5, and the entire game loaded in just 0.8 seconds! The PS4 Pro was still extremely fast and it only took just over 8 seconds to load the game, but the PS5 took 10 times less than that, and also keep in mind that this game was not optimised fully and not even developed with the PS5 in mind. 

Ok, so this is a standard mid-range laptop NVMe flash module that you can find in any laptop, right? Well, not really. You see, Mark Cerny, the lead system architect for both the PS4 and the PS5, did say that the RAW bandwidth of the PS5’s SSD is higher than of any other SSD’s on the market right now. But what benefits would an SSD bring to the PS5, other than just loading the games really fast? Well, in the Spider-Man demo for example, Sony also showed us the maximum speed that Spidey can swing on webs at, and on the PS4 Pro, once you hit a certain speed the system cannot stream the data fast enough from the HDD and therefore the game freezes and Spidey cannot swing any faster. Then with the PS5, they stared off at the same speeds as before, but everything was much smoother. Then when the speeds are increased, everything is remains perfectly fluid and Spidey can swing insanely fast! Imagine how amazing racing games will be on the PS5 thanks to this new storage. This is huge!

So you see, it’s not just that games will load faster, it’s also the experience inside of a game that would be dramatically improved. And we’ve actually had a few big leaks in terms of the PS5’s SSD recently.

An Infographic from Samsung’s event showing system boot and game launch speeds (Source: TechTastic)

According to TechTastic, Samsung had a presentation in Tokyo where they showcased their upcoming SSD for game consoles in 2020, ‘SSD era in games console 2020’, that’s what it was called. And what they showed was how improved the system boot and the game load times were. For example, with the standard HDD it would take a game console around 49 seconds to boot, and with a standard SSD it would take them around 29 seconds. However, their upcoming Optimised NVMe modules can boot the system in less than half of that, around 10 seconds. Then when it comes to game launch speeds a HDD took 38 seconds to load compared to 13 seconds with an SSD and then less than 6 seconds with the new Optimized NVMe drives. Monster Hunter was the game that these tests were being done with, just so you know.

And Mark Cerny did actually say in his interview with the Wired that the PS5 will indeed come with optimised flash storage, rather than standard modules that laptops use. So it makes a lot of sense for Sony to use Samsung’s brand new “Optimised NVMe” modules in the PS5, which means that this will be a proprietary module, specifically designed for the PS5, rather than something that you would be able to find in stores. However, there is a pretty big issue here. You see, if all the games are optimised to work with Sony’s new flash module, it won’t be cheap to manufacture by any means. I mean if you look at NVMe modules today, a 1TB Samsung made M.2 drive costs around 150-300 pounds in the UK, which is more than half of what the PS5 will cost. 

PSErebus’s tweet regarding the release date and price of the PS5

Speaking of this, twitter leakster PSErebus who’s had a pretty good track record in the past when it comes the accuracy of his leaks posted that the PS5 will be launching on November the 20th 2020, at a price of $500 which is actually the exact same price that the Xbox One X costs. Considering how powerful the PS5 will be, even when compared to the Xbox One X, I would say that $500 is an outstanding price. It’s less than a mid-range smartphone, and this is a console that will last you for 5-7 years, compared to a smartphone that most people change every 2 years or so. 

Ok, so going back to the SSD. I was saying that one issue is the high cost of the SSD itself as the PS5 is very likely to ship with a 1TB NVMe flash module. However games today have become massive and most people will need an external drive, which are supported on the PS4 and will most likely still be supported on the PS5. So the question here is, if you need more storage and you plug in an external HDD, wouldn’t this impact the games heavily, since that storage would be significantly slower than the internal storage? Keep in mind that all games will be made to take full advantage of the extremely fast internal storage.

Well, one solution to this is that Sony could indeed limit the use of external SSD’s only and drop HDD support entirely, but even those, only reach 500MB/s or so. Therefore you would need something like an external m.2 module in order to even reach speeds close to the internal module and those ones pretty expensive. However, I do have some good news here, there have been reports that Sony is planning on developing the flash module as a modular system, so that you can easily swap it out for a higher capacity modules, when you need to.

This means that Sony will very likely sell these modules alongside the PS5. They will be more expensive than what an entry level m.2 drive will cost, but they should be perfectly compatible with the PS5, and games will still make full use of those modules as well. So, if at some point in time you want to upgrade the storage to maybe 4TB you should be able to easily do that by buying one of these modules. Also, it’s very safe to assume that the PS5 will also let you connect these modules externally, so that you can also expand your internal storage.

Renders of PS5 Cartridge concept by LetsGoDigital

A brand new Sony patent uncovered by LetsGoDigital shows what looks to be a cartridge. Maybe the module 1st party SSD module that you would use to expand your PS5’s storage? Well that’s what it looked to be, and LetsGoDigital even made some renders of it, but unfortunately it turns out that its actually just a cartridge for a completely different Sony product a kids tablet/toy that you use to control some cars.

Anyway, the point is that this is completely unrelated to the PS5 unfortunately. However, like I said before, it is still very likely that Sony will indeed offer SSD modules themselves, that will extend your internal/external storage on the PS5.

Now, in case you’re worried about the storage or the price of these expansion modules, I do have some good news. Mark Cerny did say in his interview with Wired that the PS5 will support a new way of installing and playing games. You would now be able to select if you want just install the Campaign of a game, or just the Multiplayer and you can even delete parts of a game that you’ve already played and no longer wish to play. In Call of Duty Modern Warfare for example, you would be able to uninstall the Campaign right after you’ve finished it and only then install the multiplayer, which would save you around 50GB or so. 

Also, Mark Cerny did say that because of how slow the HDD was on the PS4, some developers had to make copies of the game textures multiple times so that they can load them simultaneously, since it was faster to load them this way. However, this resulted in a lot of space being wasted.

So not only will the PS5 games occupy way less storage, but parts of the games will be able to be uninstalled as we wish, which means even more free space. 

CONTROLLER

Now, something else that we’ve had recently in terms of the PS5 leaks, are some updates on the PS5 controller.

This is something that I’ve covered extensively in our last PS5 video and article. In that one I talked about some leaked PS5 development kit controller photos and showed the PS5 controller with the built-in display that replaced the touchpad. We also got the options and share buttons inverted, so they were horizontal rather than vertical. We also had microphones or dual speakers on each side of the screen and also a very weird shape that had the bottom portion of the controller indented which from the looks of it would feel very uncomfortable, but it might actually be the opposite, when holding this in person.

A design comparison between the new PS5 Controller patent (Left), the Nintendo Switch Controller (Middle) and Xbox controller (Right)

Then just last week, we had a new patent filing by Sony on what appears to be a new controller that looks very similar to the PS4 one. We have a shape that now matches the Xbox and Nintendo Switch Pro controller a bit more, which were known to be the most comfortable gaming controllers on the market, so that‘s great to see.

The TouchPad is quite a bit larger than the one we had on the PS4 controller. Also it doesn’t curve anymore but instead it’s now completely flat, which is interesting because you know what else is flat? Touchscreens. I mean yes, there are curved touchscreens and displays but those are very expensive to manufacture. So I believe that because of how this patent looks and because of the leaked PS5 controller dev kit images that we’ve seen before, the PS5 controller will indeed replace the touchpad with a full touchscreen display. And we would be able to use this in games and most importantly see the chat and friends menu. This would be great because if you want to type a message on the PS4, you either have to use the joystick, which will take you a year to type a single sentence, or you’ll have to use your smartphone which isn’t as convenient since you need to connect it to your PS4 first.

Aside from this we still seem to have 2 ports that both look to be 3.5mm headphone jacks, and we are getting a USB C port for charging, Mark Cerny did confirm that, we cannot really tell if that’s the black spot right below the headphone jack or if that’s on the back where it used to be on the PS4 controller.

The weird hole on the controller that, as of now, we are unsure what it is for

The speaker is in the exact same place, the options and share buttons are also in the same place and in the same orientation. So really, aside from the shape, USB C and the screen, the only thing that looks changed to me is that weird hole right below the PlayStation button.

When Mark Cerny had his October interview with Peter Rubin from the Wired, Mark did actually hand Peter a PS5 controller. He wasn’t allowed to share any photos or videos of it, but this is what Peter had to say: “Cerny hands me a prototype of the next-gen controller, an unlabelled matte-black doohickey that looks an awful lot like the PS4’s Dualshock 4. After all, there’s a little hole on it, and a recently published patent points to Sony developing a voice-driven AI assistant for the PlayStation.” 

If you want to look at the patent that Peter was referring to you can see it here, but from the sounds of it, the one that we’ve seen in the patent sounds like exactly the controller that Peter was given by Cerny. And that mysterious hole would then indeed be for the microphone which would be used for Sony brand new AI assistant.

So there you have it, the latest updates on the PS5. What do you think so far? Are you going to buy one?

PlayStation 5 (2020) - FULL Controller LEAKED!

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Our last PS5 video was quite a special one, because you see we got our hands on the world’s first actual photo of the PlayStation 5 dev kit! Our video actually got picked up by quite a lot of tech websites, which never really happened before, at least not to the same scale so thank you all for your support!

But now, get those snacks ready and here’s the video and article that I promised you, focused just on the PlayStation 5 controller!

If you’re a gamer then you’ll definitely enjoy this article. And if you’re not a gamer well, keep reading anyway because the PS5 will indeed be a truly revolutionary device, not just for playing the most graphically advanced games, but also for watching 4K and even 8K movies.

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When playing a game there are three very important parts of every game, in my opinion at least.

1. The Story

2. How that story is being played?

3. What the story is being played with?

Now personally, I’ve always preferred a gaming controller to a mouse and keyboard. Yes a mouse is more accurate, but a controller is much more comfortable and you get motion controllers, vibrations and even touch input, all of which immerse you so much more in the game, than a regular mouse and keyboard can.

The 1st PS1 controller, the original DualShock was one of the most iconic controllers to ever be released. It had dual joysticks, symmetrical buttons which I’ve always preferred, and vibration feedback, which back in 1997 was a huge deal. 

The DualShock 2 which was released with the PlayStation 2 back in 2000, wasn’t really that big of an upgrade. It had pretty much the same style design, just a bit slimmer, a bit lighter, and came in black but all the main buttons were actually pressure sensitive. So the more you pressed the triggers for example, the faster your car would start driving and things like that.

Then came with the DualShock 3 with the PlayStation 3. With this we got the first big change in a Sony controller. You see this was Sony’s first fully wireless controller, it featured 6-axis motion sensing which was basically a gyroscope that could sense the direction and the orientation that you held the controller at. With this you could play certain games that way and even use the controller itself as a racing wheel, really cool stuff! It also featured a miniUSB port for charging and connecting it to other devices, such as the PSP or even a full PC by using some 3rd party apps!

And then in 2013, when the PlayStation 4 was released, we got an even bigger update to Sony’s line of game controllers, the DualShock 4. Not only did the DualShock 4 feature the 1st big design change in a Sony controller, but it also came with a ton of major features.

The start and select buttons were replaced with Options and Share. We also got a built-in speaker for some sound effects that the controller would play for when let’s say, you were reloading a gun. We also got an actual touch-pad on the controller, which would not only be used in games but also in the web browser as a mouse and it was also it’s own pressable button. We got redesigned joysticks that were now concave rather than convex. It came with a massive light bar on the back for not only giving you a visual feedback of what was happening in your game, if the light went red for example, you would know that your health has reached a critical point, but that light was also used for 3D depth tracking for the PlayStation Camera and the PlayStation VR headset which was released later on. We got a microUSB port from the miniUSB that we had before, and we even got something that was by far my favourite feature, a 3.5mm headphone jack! Yes, you could now plug in any headphones that you wanted directly into the controller itself! How amazing was that? 

So yes, the PS4 controller, the DualShock 4, was the biggest change ever that Sony had made. So now what do we know when it comes to the DualShock 5, the PS5’s controller?

Well, we’ve actually had a few leaked images that give us a glimpse at the PS5 controller.

This first one was posted by Ray Sekiro on Twitter and this one shows a very weird looking controller.

The leaked PS5 controller (Source: Ray Sekiro)

Probably the first two things that you’ve noticed are the weird indented shape on the bottom, as well as the integrated display panel. But there’s quite a few more things that do stand out. The directional arrow keys on the left have now been redesigned. They’re slimmer, a bit taller and the arrow symbols are now on the inside of the keys, rather than on the outside. The PlayStation square, circle, triangle and X buttons seem to be the same as before, maybe a bit more raised, but it’s quite hard to tell from this image. The Share and Options buttons are now horizontal, rather than vertical and it seems like we also have two instead of just one speaker grills on each side of the display. And I’m not sure how well you can see this but the L1 and R1 buttons seem to have been redesigned as well and they’re much larger now. It also appears that the 3.5mm headphone jack and the proprietary connector or at least a USB type C port seem to be located on the bottom of the controller, just like on the PS4 one. 

Now let’s talk about the two elephants in the room. The Display and the Shape of this controller.

So when it comes to the display, the whole idea behind it is for it to be an upgrade to the touch panel that we had with the PS4 Controller. Personally I can definitely see this happening. That display would allow you to see certain elements of a game, such as the inventory or the in-game party or chat. I do think that that would be a very useful thing to have, since at the moment if you want to chat with your friends via text, you would connect your phone to the PlayStation, but that does take some time and typing using the joystick is just a nightmare. So something like this would speed up the typing process by a lot.

The only question is, what impact will this have on the battery life? Well it should have quite a significant one. Considering that the PS4 controller is pretty well known for a not so great battery life, I don’t think things are looking that great for the PS5 controller.

The Nintendo Switch Pro has the best battery life on a controller on the market

However, if you look at the Nintendo Switch Pro controller, that is by far the best controller on the market when it comes to battery life right on par with the Xbox One Elite 2 controller, both offering a staggering 40 hour battery life.

But even 10 hours would be enough, as long as Sony managed to add everything that they want in this controller, and I would say that that’s perfectly doable. Especially considering that the PS4 controller uses Bluetooth 2.1 and nowadays we have Bluetooth 5.0 which is significantly more power efficient. Add this to more efficient batteries and chips and I would say that 10 hours with that included display is doable.

Now when it comes to the shape, yes it does look to be extremely uncomfortable judging by how the bottom bit is lower than the top portion. I could be wrong, but I would need to hold it in my hand to see for myself how comfortable it really is.

However, something that you should keep in mind is that this is not the final version of the PS5 controller. No, this is very likely a DevKit controller that would work alongside the developers kit that I showed you guys exclusively in a previous video. So make sure you watch that one, in case you want to learn more about the actual PlayStation 5, as this is mostly about the controller itself.

So the final version will be more polished, with a thinner design, and possibly without that indented part towards the bottom. 

Now, when I first saw that image, I did consider the fact that it might be a very well done render. However, I don’t think this is the case for two reasons.

The first one being that we make 3D renders here at ZONEofTECH as well, like the PS5 one that you’ve seen. That was very well done and it’s also an extremely difficult shape to do, so if the controller image is a render, it’s probably the best one that I’ve seen.

Secondly, there were actually multiple leaked photo of this controller, from many other sources and they all look the same. Twitter user Tidux posted an image that shows this PS5 controller, and we have another image that was posted on Reddit, that again shows the same controller from a different angle. The image has been taken down from Reddit but you can see it on hothardware.com here.

Now they could all be renders made by the same person that decided to share it with random people but I don’t think that’s the case. If we take a look at an actual photo of a real PlayStation 4 dev kit controller, you can see that even this one had that big, thick and chunky form factor, and we all know how much thinner and sleeker it got with the final unit. However, the main characteristic of the controller still remained. Things like the overall design from the front, the button layout, the touch bar and even the light bar. Even though it did look more squared off in the dev-kit model.

Now we have actually made our own PS5 controller 3D model. It’s a blend of the PS4 controller and the PS5 dev kit controller. 

The ZONEofTECH PS5 Controller Render

So we still have overall the same PS4 controller design, just with slightly longer handles. We do have the built-in display, the horizontal Options and Share Buttons, the light bar on the top which we’ve actually made bigger than on the PS4 one, for even easier tracking from a greater distance. We’ve implemented the dual speakers to the side of the display, and the 3.5mm headphone jack on the bottom. We did actually removed Sony’s proprietary connector, in favour of just the USB type C port on the back and that’s pretty much it!

You can see how similar it looks to the PS4 controller, yet how it incorporates the brand new features, such as the display, the speakers, and also a very unique feature that I haven’t mentioned before.

So Sony has had another interview with The Wired, back in early October, where they not only confirmed the name of the PS5 which, surprise surprise is indeed PlayStation 5, but they also confirmed the release date, Holidays 2020 alongside some exclusive details about the PS5 controller.

Mark Cerny, the lead architect on both the PS4 had the PS5, had an interview with Peter Rubin of the Wired, and Mark actually handed Rubin a PS5 controller, which according to Peter, looked very similar to the PS4 controller. According to Mark, it would be a next-generation controller as well, a change as big as the PS4 controller was from the PS3 controller.

Apparently Sony will now have a voice assistant similar to Siri, Alexa or Cortana, built into the PS5, and the controller will also have a built-in microphone to pick up that audio.

The second change that was officially confirmed are adaptive triggers that can offer varying levels of resistance based on the weapon that you use. So you’ll be able to feel the tension increasing as you pull the arrow back in a bow and different weapons having different feels on the trigger, really cool stuff!

The new haptic engine will give the user real time feedback depending on the environment they are in, like driving on dirt in Gran Turismo Sport (Source: Sony)

And the third officially confirmed change would be a haptic engine. This would be similar to what modern smartphone use today but basically on steroids. You’ll be able to feel not just vibrations but also certain elements in a game. Peter was saying how he played a platformer game and he could actually feel things such as sand, mud, and ice on the thumbsticks. He could feel the haptic engine and the triggers offering a different type of resistance based on the environment that he was in, in the game. Peter was also shown a new version of Grand Turismo Sport running on the PS5 and he said he could fee the difference in terrain when he was driving on asphalt to when he came off the track and onto grass, sand, gravel.

If this is all true then this is incredible! I am really excited for that, although I believe the competitive gaming community would be a bit frustrated with having joysticks that constantly feel different based on what you touch and what you pick up. But this will definitely be something that the developer can enable or disable and tweak to their liking. 

Also USB type C is confirmed for the next-gen PS5 controller, which was quite expected, and Mark Cerny also confirmed the existence of a larger battery. He also confirmed that the controller is indeed heavier than a PS4 controller but still lighter than the current Xbox Controller. 

With all of this in mind I am very excited for the new PS5 and really excited to check out the new controller and see if all the rumours are true. Let me know in the comments what you guys are excited for with the PS5!

[EXCLUSIVE] PS5 (2020) - First Look, Release Date & More!

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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!

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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!

The leaked image we received

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.