GAMERS may get their first look at the PlayStation 5 tonight – during a highly secretive virtual Sony event.
We’re expecting to see gameplay footage from early PS5 games, but a full reveal of the console’s design could be on the cards.
When is the PS5 event? Date, start time and how to watch
The event is taking place virtually on Thursday, June 11.
It will begin at 4pm New York time / 9pm London time, and will be live-streamed.
The event was originally scheduled for last week, but was delayed due to the unrelated protests.
At the time, PlayStation said: “We have decided to postpone the PlayStation 5 event scheduled for June 4.
“While we understand gamers worldwide are excited to see PS5 games, we do not feel that right now is a time for celebration.
“And for now, we want to stand back and allow more important voices to be heard.”
Sony will be streaming the event on YouTube and Twitch.
What to expect from PS5 June 11 event
Microsoft has already unveiled the Xbox Series X in full (though we still don’t know its price).
By contrast, Sony is still keeping the PS5 design under tight wraps – but that could soon change.
Sadly, it looks like tonight probably won’t see the reveal of the PS5’s design.
Instead, it’s looking much more likely that we’ll simply get a look at gameplay footage.
“We will soon give you a first look at the games you’ll be playing after the PlayStation 5 launches this holiday,” said PlayStation boss Jim Ryan.
“The games coming to PS5 represent the best in the industry from innovative studios that span the globe.”
It’s not clear exactly what games we’l get a look at during Sony’s event.
We’d guess a peek at a new God of War title and The Last of Us Part 2, which launches on PS4 next week but has not yet been confirmed for the PS5.
Sony is also heavily rumoured to be working on followups so PlayStation-exclusive titles Spider-Man and Bloodborne, so don’t be surprise if those make an appearance.
What we know for sure is that the company will host its annual State of Play presentation in August.
It’s safe to say we’ll get a good look at the PS5 during that show if Sony hasn’t already made its long-anticipated reveal by then.
PS5 specs – what’s the latest news?
Sony used a special press conference in March to detail the PS5’s specs.
The performance will be groundbreaking, Sony explained.
“Soon there are games that could never have been created before,” said Sony’s Mark Cerny, lead architect of PS5.
The console features a 10.28 teraflop GPU clocked at 2.234GHz.
That’s fewer teraflops (or trillion operations per second), than the Xbox Series X, which is promising 12 teraflops.
Fortunately, much of game loading comes down to RAM, or fast memory.
And the PS5 boasts 16GB of nippy GDDR6 memory – just like the Xbox Series X.
PS5 release date – when is the new console out?
In a blog post, PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said: “Since we originally unveiled our next-generation console in April, we know that there’s been a lot of excitement and interest in hearing more about what the future of games will bring.
“Today I’m proud to share that our next-generation console will be called PlayStation 5, and we’ll be launching in time for Holiday 2020.”
That’s not a specific date, but it’s effectively a promise that you’ll be able to buy it in the run-up to Christmas 2020.
In reality, that probably means the new console going on sale in October or November.
That’s a great time for a new console to come out, as those months are when blockbuster releases like new Call of Duty games typically happen.
So what’s the likeliest date? Well the PS4 launched on November 15, 2013 – a Friday.
And the PS4 Pro launched on November 10, 2016 – a Thursday.
Based on those launches, we predict either a November 12 or 13 PS5 release date in 2020.
Sony PS5 controller – what do we know?
The October announcement also revealed details about the PS5 controller.
Sony’s new controller will feature haptic feedback that replaces the “rumble” technology typically found in joypads.
The term “haptic” literally means “relating to touch”, and so it’s about providing better touch feedback to your hands.
That means more vibrating motors in your controller in places like the triggers and even joysticks to give what PlayStation calls “a broader range of feedback”.
“Crashing into a wall in a race car feels much different than making a tackle on the football field,” said PlayStation boss Jim Ryan.
“You can even get a sense for a variety of textures when running through fields of grass or plodding through mud.”
The new controller will also feature adaptive triggers – technology built into the L2 and R2 trigger buttons.
Developers will be able to program the resistance of these triggers so you can feel the “tactile sensation of drawing a bow and arrow”, for instance.
Game creators are already receiving early versions of the new controller.
Will it be able to play PS4 games?
Yes, it will.
The first official revelations confirmed it would be fully backwards-compatible with all PS4 games.
A patent revealed last year but filed in 2016 outlined some pretty nifty technology for automatically increasing the quality of older games when played on a newer networked system.
It showed off the ability to replace textures and audio files on the fly with higher-quality versions as they became available.
The possibilities of this for backwards-compatible games are obvious, but the timing of the original filing doesn’t suggest it’s got much to do with PS5 plans specifically.
Another patent filed in 2019 suggested that the PS5 processor would be able to pretend to be the processors from older consoles, and thus play their games natively.
How fast will the PS5 be?
Loading up a game on the PlayStation 5 will be ten times faster than on PS4, according to a demo shown off by Sony.
A scene that took over 8 seconds to load on top-end PS4 Pro hardware was shown popping up in 0.8 seconds in a video shown to investors.
This demo, shown off in Japan to an audience of investors was recorded by Wall Street Journal reporter Takashi Mochizuki.
The magic happens because the PS4 has to load games off an old-fashioned spinning hard drive, the PS5 will load them straight from a solid-state drive.
Solid state drives have been found in gaming PCs and fancy laptops, like gaming favourite the Razer Blade Stealth, for some time.
They don’t have any moving parts, and your computer can read the data off any part of them right away.
Normal hard drives store data on spinning magnetised plates, so the computer not only needs to spin the plate to be able to read it, it also needs to find and then physically read the correct bit of disc to get the data off it.
The downside is that solid-state drives are much more expensive than normal hard drives, and many fear it’s going to push the price of the new console up.