The war between gaming consoles are about to start again. It is the new generation of consoles that are going to be involved in the fight. Microsoft’s new Xbox Series X, and Sony’ brand new PlayStation 5 that was just about teased last night (in Malaysia’s time).

We would elaborate specifically on the Microsoft Xbox Series X, but they are not actually available officially in Malaysia. So, we would do a hard pass on that and focus on the Sony PlayStation 5, which will be available in Malaysia and most parts of the world. We are also PlayStation users, currently on the PlayStation 4 Pro; needless to say, we are quite excited about PlayStation 5 (PS5) launching at the end of 2020.

The announcement last night was called ‘The Road to PS5’. That is Sony’s way of saying also that this is not technically an unveiling of the new hardware, rather a glimpse of what we can expect the new hardware to pack. We have seen renders here and there of the PS5, but there is no definite shape of it just yet. Sony is doing a good job in keeping mums about it too. All we know though; we can expect it to look quite different from Xbox’s boxy tower design language.

Despite not talking about design, we can sort of understand the challenges when it comes to designing a console. They’ve elaborated on the main challenge of designing a gaming console with ultra-powerful processors too – cooling and powering them. If you really think about it, this was also an issue in the early days of the PS4. This issue is not even native to Sony’s console, it is a concern for almost any powerful gaming rigs. We will get to cooling and power supply a little later though.

For now, we get to the meat of this content – the specs of the PS5. Here it is; It is packing a lot of power from a AMD Ryzen Zen 2 architecture CPU. That AMD processor will come with 8 cores, 16 threads, and will clock at up to 3.5GHz. Sony says that the processor will run at about 3.5GHz most of the time by default. At this point you might start looking up at the Xbox and find that the Xbox runs faster at 3.8GHz. They are running on the same CPU, so why is the one on Xbox more powerful? All I can say for now is ‘power supply’ and ‘cooling’.

Then there is the GPU, the graphics processor. It clocks at up to 2.23GHz with 36 CUs and is based on AMD’s Radeon RDNA-2 engine. It is supposed to be able to have Ray Tracing Acceleration, and the combination is also supposed to process at 10.3 teraFLOPS. Wait a minute, that is not as powerful as the Xbox with the same RDNA-2 based engine with 52 CUs at 1.825GHz that can do 12 teraFLOPS.

You are absolutely correct in that comparison. From a hardware standpoint then, the PS5 is quite shorthanded in the fight. They have the shorter stick compared to the Xbox at this point. We can only speculate as to why that is, and we are suspecting cooling and power supply to be an issue too.

On the Sony PS5 you are also getting a larger RAM compared to before, faster too. It is a 16GB DDR6 RAM that is said to be better optimised to deliver better game experiences. GDDR6 is of course known for its speed and the one on the PS5 can go at 448GBps. The PS5 also comes with an upgraded 825GB drive. It is not a traditional HDD though, it is an SSD this time that can read at up to 5.5GBps. Also smaller than Xbox’s 1TB SSD.

There is an upside to all these numbers though. For one, it is still a big leap from the PS4; heck even the PS4 Pro. All the hardware means that it can now easily support 120Hz 4K gaming, push itself on 8K TVs (if you can afford one), and they say that it is about 10x faster than the previous generation console. In that, we believe. It is also backward compatible with Sony’s previous PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro; what a delight.

There is more, if you can believe it. Where they skim down in graphics and process handling, they put into something called “Tempest”. For you Mass Effect fans, calm down. It is not the “Tempest” spaceship we see in Mass Effect 4: Andromeda (not that great of a game, by the way). It is their latest 3D Audio processing chip; their AudioTech.

In its basic form, it is just another processor that is lodged inside the PS5, making the new upcoming Sony gaming console effectively a three-processor system. Its core design is very similar to that of a GPU. Within the presentation though, Sony seems to give a very big emphasis on audio. They say that while harnessing processing power for graphics is hard, processing an audio can be quite complex too. That is the reason they are transforming a GPU to an APU (Audio Processing Unit).

The idea of using “Tempest” is to create a 3D audio experience on any platform. To be very fair, PlayStation users would be using the console in almost all kinds of conditions. The most common would be plugging them to a generic TV and rely on the TV speakers as their means of audio. There are those who might spend a little bit more and buy headphones for their console. Then there are those who has a theatre grade system with 3 or more speakers placed around them. Sony recognises all of that and wants all of us to get the same treatment and experience.

We have said before that audio is a very big part of any gaming, or even movie watching experience. It is not just music. Sound designs do play a big role in bringing us closer to the whatever intended experience there may be. Sony knows this too, being one of the big players in high-end audio. That is why the “Tempest” is born. They utilise something called Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) for audio reproduction. You can, of course Google that term because it is a whole complex audio science in itself. All you need to know is that the Sony PS5 is going to give you 3D audio wherever you go. We are thinking of having an editorial specifically on sounds and sound engineering; do comment and let us know if you are interested.

The presentation ends there though. There are no new renders on the hardware, nor even the controller. We sort of have an idea of how they might look like, but all of us could be wrong. Still, we are optimistic. The slightly less powerful hardware may make the Sony look a like a worse deal than the Xbox, especially when they are rumoured to be about the same price. Still, in Malaysia we are only going to be able to touch the Sony PS5 when they are launched. So we will see. Both are expected to launch sometime later in the year 2020. You can watch the whole announcement after the break.

Source: Sony Interactive Entertainment Blog