Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details
theverge.com
theverge.com
This will wind up making for the most interesting console generation since the 32/64 bit era, since the platform differences go beyond hardware specs and release date. M/G's platform/subscription approach seems to be more in line with where the world is going, but remains to be seen if the timing's right.
In other words, they aren't giving up on local hardware; Microsoft is big enough to do both.
More opinionated point here, but I really think this current generation will go down in history as the most interesting console generation of all time. Its the first generation that's felt like every player is just innovating their fucking heart out and truly pushing what consoles are capable of, while simultaneously releasing literally the highest quality games ever made during any generation. We're in a golden age right now.
With Stadia and, honestly, Apple Arcade kind of competing in the "next generation" of consoles, there are more players than ever, but the narrative will still be driven by Sony and Nintendo. American tech companies get a lot of mindshare, but the reality is that every single Playstation couch console has outsold every single Xbox console, even if you compare cross-generation. PSN is the world's most active gaming community. The reason is the Games. American tech companies get SO DISTRACTED by all this technology and value add services, but American companies just don't get the games right, especially this generation. Stadia can throw money at the problem, but Microsoft has been doing that for years and all they've ended up with is their Three Big Studios (343, The Coalition, Turn10/Playground). Compared to the breadth and more importantly quality of Sony's and Nintendo's studios, the attempt isn't enough. Stadia just can't enter at the 11th hour and expect to do better.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-sony-next-gen-console/
I’m excited. ;)
So at that point of needing a pretty big SSD, make the console less expensive by only having the SSD, then let the user plug in a cheap external hard drive. Five minutes to transfer a game is pretty reasonable.
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/251038-theres-no-profit-m...
https://attackofthefanboy.com/news/microsoft-small-profit-ma...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/20/at-399-r...
Seems like Sony was the only one selling at a slight loss (compared to the PS3's heavy 200+ USD loss per unit) and it's most likely improved for everybody since.
The Apple TV does some really interesting stuff with how it manages large games and files. Too bad it doesn't ship with a controller.
Since the console is very low on writes they can probably make these like 0.3DPWD for fairly cheap at Sony scale.
VR can be bandwidth intensive. VR immersive-gaming low-end headsets are 60 fps, and high-end are 90 fps. And I've been told 120 fps is a noticeable "like butter" improvement on 90 fps. So a 8K@30 might mean 4K@120.
VR lenses piss away pixels. With a current 1440x1440/eye, you might get only a ~500 pixel circle of crisply clear pixels. So if you want screen-comparable resolution you're all set now... if that screen is a 1980's VGA IBM PC. With this wastage, 5K/eye might let you render virtual 1080p screens.
A headset providing both wide fov and this year's "high" resolution would be about 4K/eye. And I'm thinking about modding a narrow-fov drone headset (less lens blur) with two 4K panels, because I'm tired of waiting for the game-focused VR HMD market to get around to screen-comparable resolution.
"But won't 8K require an insane graphics card?" No. The old generation of VR headsets was doing brute force. Foveated rendering greatly reduces GPU load. And frankly, even without it, I've run a VR desktop (non-immersive low-fps with camera-passthrough) on a WMR HMD using a crufty old laptop's integrated graphics. GPU isn't a blocker for higher resolution HMDs.
Newer stuff upscaled from 1080 generally looks fine to my increasingly middle-aged eyes, but content filmed on older cameras looks awful at 4k (Law and Order springs to mind)
https://nofilmschool.com/2013/07/4k-uhd-color-space-gamut-fr...
Personally, I'd like a nice large wall size screen where I can "spread out my work" and read it.
Throw in a Minority Report interface so I'm not stuck with a mouse and keyboard:
> Throw in a Minority Report interface so I'm not stuck with a mouse and keyboard:
Remember the gorilla arm.
My point is that the tech for minority report exists today (soli, leap, etc.) but the demand for novel mobile device interfaces is stronger than some waving-your-arms interface at a giant desk full of monitors.
Yes; I’m sorry. I did not see that you were not “melling”, the GP poster.
I’m still confused about what your point is. If you simply meant that Soli, etc. might not have the gorilla arm problem, then I am open to the idea, but remain somewhat skeptical. It might work for using a handheld device for a few seconds, but what I’m worried about, and what the GP wanted, was “a nice large wall size screen”, and in that context, doing real work for extended periods, I remain doubtful.
And now stuff like F1 racing is also streamable in 4k.
Here's a couple charts: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0095/4332/files/optimal_bi... https://di2vvsisz3gt1.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2018...
It's possible to design a codec to handle that kind of detail scaling internally, but I don't think it's been a big priority.
[1] (31802160)/(19201080) = 3.3125
Pedantically, 4K is 4096x2160 but UHD has come to resonate as 4K thanks to TV marketing.
However, that means nothing for live streaming as generally speaking "live stream" compression really tends to suck a lot. And as to the above, a lot of devices don't do well with 4k h.265 streams for playback, but getting better.
Also, I really don't think I'd notice going from 4K to 8K for home video, maybe for some gaming, but even then I'm doubtful. Also, I'd expect 8K gaming on even next gen's console to be closer to Wii model quality than what we see in 1080p gaming today.
That's something I kinda wish more game ethusiasts would pick up on. There's not really a such thing as "4K" or "1080P" or whatever; it's more about fill rates and other numbers and the question of how much you can push at 1080P or whatever, vs. what the developer tries to push.
There's actually a couple of PS2 games that push 1080 (can't remember if it's P or i) with the right setup. But obviously, there's a quality stepdown.
There's no particular reason other than lack of hardware outputs the PS3-era machines couldn't push 4K games. They'd just have to be very, very simple games. I recall being impressed in the PS2 era by Katamari Damacy, which seemed to be one of the few games of its era that noticed that if you only allocate like 10 polygons and a teenytiny texture for a game world object you can have a crapton of things happening on the screen, at a high frame rate, and build a game around it. I can only imagine what a full-powered, brand-new Katamari Damacy would look like on even a Switch today.
Though, I still tend to mostly use 720p h.265 for TV watching as, again, it's "good enough" that I often don't notice too much. 65" TV at about 10' away. I do notice from 720p to 1080 and from 1080 to 4k (UHD). It depends more on what I'm watching. Some settings are better on some content, and as I mention I actually like the way h.265 degrades (often blurry in the background) vs blocky h.264. (facial hair for live motion is my guide)
https://support.video.ibm.com/hc/en-us/articles/207852117-In...
https://www.howtogeek.com/338983/how-much-data-does-netflix-...
https://help.yitechnology.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005742328...
You might find this interesting https://trekmovie.com/2019/03/15/star-trek-fan-tests-using-a...
Funny they mentioned NTSC being poor quality - I used to know someone who did work with Philips and he said they'd refer to it as Never The Same Color
Even though this uses a custom GPU, if consoles don't support ray tracing, PC games are unlikely to be designed for it, since most games have cross platform releases.
It's also interesting to me that they're supporting the existing PSVR - The new hardware will really help it have some amazing experiences, and it suggests they're decoupling their VR products from the console releases.
As far as PSVR, the herculean amount of effort required to get something in the vein of backwards compatibility going between PS3 and PS4 makes me think it was designed from the ground up to work with basically everything PS4.
Sony and other hardware makers also sell a lot of accessories, which often have huge margins too. The online services they sell also have big margins.
Selling hardware at a loss is one reason that consoles have always punched much higher graphically relative to price.
If the PS5 comes out for $500, it probably cost Sony around $700 to make it, and this is with getting massive volume discounts (guaranteed CPU and GPU contracts over several years with huge volumes of orders coming in) that your PC can't get.
And then because consoles only have one CPU and GPU combo to program to, you can get a lot more out of the hardware than you can with a PC.
This is why when the PS5 and the new Xbox launch, it'll probably give you better fidelity than a much more expense gaming PC -- and it will only get better visual fidelity for years to come as developers learn to exploit the architecture better.
Here's a 2 year old video comparing a $550 PC (with RX480) to PS4 Pro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HueyUmSHrdo
Also, PS4 Pro specs list its GPU perf at 4.2 Tflops, while a GTX 1080, worth $499 and predating PS4 Pro by half a year has 8.2 Tflops. It's in the ballpark of 3.8Tflops of GTX 1060, MSRP $249.
The PS4 Pro's CPU at 2.13 GHz is also not what one would call punching above your weight. There are cheap i3's more powerful than that.
A console's value is a very dubious proposition if you are in a country which is given a favorable regional pricing by Steam.
Heck, look at what Nintendo has done with Breath of the Wild on the Switch hardware.
It's the same reason people pay a premium for Apple products even when they're strictly less functional - they're nicer to use.
Apple products have quite a few things going for them other than the smooth UX, I remember being surprised that a lot of non-technical people thought that they could not get a virus if they used Macs instead of PCs.
I still run into about one person a year on the internet who still can't understand why we're not all running Cell processors in our desktops, or who still thinks the PS3 has never had its power "fully unlocked", the answer being Sony hyped them well beyond what the tech could actually handle. In the end, it was merely about the level of hardware we'd expect for that amount of money at that time in a console, and was somewhat ahead of the XBox 360 in some ways and somewhat behind in others, not some sort of massive cutting edge next step thing that nobody caught up to for years.
I'd say take Sony's claims with a grain of salt, but that's probably not strong enough; do something more like divide everything they say by 4 or 5 and you're probably getting closer to the truth.
The PS4 (and XB1) are structured like most other PCs. It makes sense the peripherals would still be compatible, and it would be easy to make games backwards compatible.
While I'm not really much of a gamer now I spent a lot of my childhood playing video games and the thought of dedicated home game consoles going the way of arcades makes me sad.
I think I'll finally pick up that Switch I've been planning on...
Granted: If anybody can make it work, it's gonna be Google, but I'm still quite skeptical. For many consumers network bandwidth and traffic volume are still very real issues, and there's not that much Google can do about that on a global scale, at least in the short time-frame.
Long-term they would have to roll out Google fiber on a global scale and pretty much go into the ISP business with full commitment, which I just don't see happening because Google fiber is dead.
Why? Because Xbox UI has been deteriorating from bad to completely unusable. Like infuriating! I mostly use it to watch Netflix, prime and occasionally run Kodi and media player and play CoD or some other game. Would it be possible to always have these <10 titles on startup screen? Of course no, you may get a couple of most recent ones, but then you have to navigate to apps (which must be impossible to find if you don’t know where it is), select all my apps, or games and finally find what you needed. <\rant>
In fact, it should probably be forbidden for wasting precious resources for no good reason.
You are right that most folks with 50-65" TVs at 2-3 meters don't benefit from anything higher than 1080p.
It sounds like this will be similar to the way some other sound card manufacturers have created "3d audio" in that you won't need something like a 7.1 system to be able to better portray where exactly a sound is coming from. Stereo headphones will be able to give you a more immersive feeling by having audio be more directional instead of a general area (i.e. left speaker or right speaker).
And if 3d audio is so great, why doesn't everyone just use stereo speakers (maybe with a subwoofer)?
I'm sure some people do use stereo speakers, but headphones are almost a given for professional gaming since it shuts out environmental noise to hear quiet noises in game. Paired with 3d audio it would probably just give better situational awareness. As to how well it will work, I can't answer that.
Speakers are much less fussy and a lot nicer in a theater setup, but without feeding directly into your ears you need to actually surround yourself with audio sources (possibly bouncing some with a sound bar).
Stereo headphones all the way. You only have two ears; they can only ascertain direction based on a) the amplitude and phase differences between the sound reaching each ear and b) the frequency and time-domain filtering effects of your outer ear. These effects can be very accurately emulated using a physical head model or digital signal processing. Properly recorded and mixed binaural audio will provide the most convincing spatial effect, because your eardrums can't tell the difference between a binaural recording and actually being in an acoustic environment.
>And if 3d audio is so great, why doesn't everyone just use stereo speakers (maybe with a subwoofer)?
Your living room isn't an anechoic chamber, so you're hearing both the sound of your speakers and the reverberation of your room. You can tell that you're listening to two sound sources positioned in front of you, because that room reverberation provides substantial spatial information about your actual acoustic environment and degrades the spatial information of the recording. You can mount speakers really close to your ears, so you only hear the sound of each speaker with one ear without the colouring effect of your listening environment; we call such an arrangement "headphones".
I've done both, and (for me) it's the opposite. You're probably right for "accuracy of sound", but when gaming having a bunch of powerful speakers making sound effects gives a better "experience". :)
eg You can feel decent sized speakers with your whole body, which you're missing when using just headphones
Headphones provide a worse spatial experience than stereo speakers where the source material has been mixed for speakers; the equation becomes significantly different with flexible spatial formats like Dolby Atmos.
>You can feel decent sized speakers with your whole body
Using headphones with a subwoofer is a workable (albeit highly antisocial) option. You can't feel frequencies above about 150Hz, which is comfortably within the bandwidth of most headphones. You can also fit a low-frequency transducer to your chair, which will provide a similar feel to a powerful subwoofer without annoying the neighbours.
Speakers are undoubtedly more convenient and more practical for shared listening, but headphones provide a simply unmatched price-to-performance ratio; to get the best out of a pair of speakers, you need to spend at least as much on acoustic treatment to control the resonance of your listening environment.
Agreed. I'm back to using headphones myself at the moment (moved location recently, not yet set up properly), but I'm really missing my proper sound system setup. ;)
They can, primarily because ear shape varies, and you're going to hear the sounds from different positions based on the differences between the modeled and actual ear shapes. The infamous barber shop recording fails (for me) because it isn't clear what's in front of the user, and what is behind the user.
A great example of why ear shape matters is that ears can tell the location of objects in a vertical space based on the shape of the ear.
That said, I mostly agree with you in terms of the sound quality, especially in terms of price.
Headphones are much better than cheapo speaker setups, but a good 7.1 (or even 5.1) system gives a better experience.
I'd probably put it down to being able to feel the noise with your whole body :) with good speakers, rather than the ears-only noise from headphones.
Headphones simply can't mirror that effect, and you can tell this by simply turning your head while wearing them. If the soundscape doesn't change, it's not going to be accurate in terms of position.
Specifically, it's likely about the inclusion and use of TrueAudio[2], its current encarnation (TrueAudio Next) or a successor of that.
On my own experience with Sennheiser HD600 headphones, these effects can sound real to the point of tricking my mind.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording
In games, you usually have mono sound emitters placed in a 3d world and dynamically mix the sound channels but its still mono sound sources. You hear the same sound in all the speakers but only at different volumes.
3D audio most likely refers to newer audio systems that work with binaural of other multi channel sound sources that account for source and listener position and forward direction. These are getting popular because of VR. Its much easier to mix an ambient soundscape as 3D audio and drop it into a game than to place many emitters.
You can also get some binaural effect now with current sound pipelines (VR games do it) but my guess is in this gen its most likely done with code in the CPU instead of hardware acceleration.
Has any of Sony's next-generation consoles just been "spec-upgraded" versions of previous ones? What a weird comment.
When you say it's next generation and deserving of the title PS5....whatever.
Naughty Dog is the studio who can pull it off, on both PS4/PS5, or just PS5.
There are a lot of solid boxes that Sony's ticking: backwards compatibility with the previous generation, sticking with physical game copies instead of moving towards a "games-as-a-service" cloud model, updates to hardware that justify the new console's number increment, releasing devkits early to get game devs on board with said hardware, etc.
That being said, as others have mentioned, the support for 8K stupifies me. As far as I understand it, 8K displays are only just now becoming commercial, and only for the highest buyers. I'd much rather have higher, consistent framerates.
Ray-tracing, I'm indifferent to. If they can make it work, great, more reflective windows and puddles for all. If not, then perhaps game devs can choose not to implement it.
Shame there will be no additional information on this at E3. Makes me wonder if they're saving their winning hand for a future round of poker, so to speak.
Edit: spelling
If that's the case, then props for forward thinking on their part.
Recently on a whim I decided to plug in my N64 to a 1080p TV, and I was surprised how terribly the graphics scaled to the higher resolution.
Additionally, developers didn't have a great handle on how the more modern memory hierarchy (read high DRAM latency) affected things yet so a lot of techniques they used sort of fought against the architecture and led to low resolutions, and they used heavy blurring and antialiasing to compensate.
Nothing disappointing, but also nothing surprising/exciting.
There really isn't much revolutionary/big they could do, tough, apart from VR as part of the package.
4K gaming on PC, even with decent hardware, is still somewhat hard to hit comfortable frame rates.
Power isn’t the issue as the Xbox One S is equivalent to a base PS4 and handles 4k discs fine.
I don't see how this could possibly be. Ease of development could mean the difference between your next favorite game existing at all. Or having the funds to become your next favorite game instead of cutting scope into a mediocre game that never got to realize its full creative ambition.
All upstream concerns contribute to the end result that you do care about.
Anything that helps people create AAA-quality games without needing the coffers of Electronic Arts is good for gamers.
Do you have any examples of the complexity of AAA graphics caused a game to either have its scope cut, or not exist at all? The only one remotely close to that is Destiny 1's devtools making created/editing levels difficult. However, that game had more fundamental problems, like needing to support the PS3 in addition to the PS4.
NVidia has a bunch of demos with their newest hard-ware. The "Stormtroopers" demo was rendered in real-time, but on a very high-end >$60k workstation.
I generally think there will be limited urgency to upgrade to 8K any time soon (benefits over 4K seem incremental and we're not close to done w/ that transition yet) in the home, but love that Sony is making a strong stake for technical leadership.
I've just googled: Netflix yearly revenue is 16B and Netflix spent 12B on content.
Just like how TVs come with default settings that mangle the picture quite a lot, and only some people will fix them.
I'm sure all those things are possible, but it's also pretty likely that they're actually producing and distributing content in 4K and Dolby Vision.
But yeah, I think the actual presence of additional dynamic range is pretty noticeable for most well-produced content.
It's just a matter of fact that, for various (many) reasons, people will get 720p streams. Some of these people are paying $3/month for "Premium" with "Ultra HD" and simply do not notice that they are not getting 4K streams. NetFlix would probably rather keep the $3/month, the alternative would be to educate their users about why they are are not getting 4K (can your TV handle it? can your playback device handle it? are they connected correctly? are they configured correctly? do you have sufficient bandwidth? are there problems with your ISP? does your device have the right DRM?) and this is both time-consuming and likely to create a bit of a support nightmare.
I think this is how perfect society should work when marginal cost is zero.
Netflix cannot directly charge proportionally to your income.
But the cost of your TV set is somewhat proportional to your income.
If you have 4K TV then you are rich, and you can afford to pay more. To allow poor people who cannot even buy FullHD TV to pay less.
So everyone can watch movies, poor folks can afford it, and rich people won't mind the price.
In another word, it would be worse (from a society point of view), if the price was constant, but only rich people could use Netflix.
(BTW this is how people pay for government services with taxes: rich people pay more money (even with flat tax rate) but get the same service).
As a very happy PS4 Pro customer, I'm definitely also in the optimistic camp. Heck, I don't even care all that much for the hardware, but I absolutely loved Horizon Zero Dawn and given its a PS exclusive I'll buy the PS5 just because of the next HZD installment.
My plan for 8k is to wait for mass market adoption before buying one and hooking it up to a DRM-box built by a company with foreseeable financial interest in "stimulating" display upgrades during a down quarter.
I miss the idealistic days when hackers held grudges. Don't buy Sony. They are the enemy.
One key difference being that while the PS5 will be backwards compatible with PS4 games, any PC is backwards compatible with virtually every PC game ever made.
If there's a case to be made for purchasing a next gen console instead of a gaming PC - other than artificial reasons like exclusive titles - I'd like to hear it.
To start with, you’re probably looking at $399 vs $2k.
We always get outlandish supercomputer hype preceding every console generation. It's a story as old as time!
I believe it does, but I bet they didn't pay $500.
I'm sure "8K" in practice just means "HDMI 2.1"
The quality, story, characters, and graphically fidelity are often unrivaled by their contemporaries. God Of War(2018), Horizon Zero Dawn, the Uncharted series, and Shadow of the Colossus (remake) are some of my favorite releases of this generation. I'll gladly plunk down $400+ for their next gen console for more games like that, I don't focus on the tech specs, but rather the experience their platform provides.
I think for the most part that Sony does the former, and I'm fine with that.
Epic has been getting a lock of Flack lately for doing the latter. Games that were already on Steam were taken off Steam because Epic paid for exclusivity. That's just scummy, IMO.
Oh, and Last of Us.
Both those games were magic.
I don’t have time to mess around with PCs and driver updates and what not, and I like sitting on the couch with a controller playing on my TV.
Add the exclusives and that’s enough incentive to spend $300-$400.
That is literally the reason for the tech inclined, and it's not artificial. The politics behind it don't matter; if I want to play X and I can only play it on console Y, guess what I'm going to buy?
Other than that, consoles are still cheaper than building a comparable gaming rig. Not by a huge margin, but still cheaper, and people already ha e nice TVs to play on (so don't ignore the cost of a monitor.) Beyond price, the fact is that building a rig is harder than plugging in a console. I know it's not _hard_, but most people just don't want to deal with it.
The system better be backwards-compatible, consoles these days are pretty much more custom PCs, there shouldn't be a problem with backwards-compatibility. Switching to SSD is also a no-brainer, getting better load times as a result of using better hardware isn't that big of an accomplishment, and you could get that performance increase even with a Ps3 if you swapped out the drives iirc.
The lack of a wow factor is a good thing, IMO. When they try too hard we get weird stuff like the Cell architecture.
It's good to be future-proof, and if you are at a desk you can pretty easily get a screen where the difference is notable. And people are making 8k content, so you want to support playing that on your flashy high-end machine.
But the important part would be the implications for VR. And also that if it can output 8k@60, then it can output 4k@veryhigh.
"Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details: 8K graphics, ray tracing, SSDs, and PS4 backwards compatibility"