PS5: All our hopes, desires and dreams for Sony’s fifth major home video game console.
New game consoles are always exciting, especially when the console in question is the PS5, Sony’s fifth installment of the PlayStation consoles. And while we’d like to stoke the rumor flames and tell you there’s a console coming in the near future – it’s hard to say when we’ll see the PS5 (or PlayStation 5 if you prefer) .
Here’s some good news: while we’re not sure when the PS5 is coming, Sony President and CEO Shawn Layden confirmed in an interview with Golem.de that the PlayStation 5 would be coming eventually … just not anytime soon.
It makes sense Sony isn’t jumping on the next-gen bandwagon just yet. The company practically just released the PS4 Pro, a mid-generation console upgrade that’s expanded the hardware’s functionality sufficiently, and probably still sees a lot of life in the fourth-generation PlayStation.
There’s also the question of what, exactly, the PS5 could do better.
Sony now has a system that’s capable of both HDR and 4K upscaled gameplay which, for most gamers, is more than enough for the time-being.
Unless Sony has a treasure trove of 8K TVs ready to ship out exclusively with PS5 consoles, there might not be a point in launching a new system right now.
But, perhaps even more importantly, the console’s existence and recent success has called into question whether a proper follow-up to the PS4 will ever be needed. We might be moving towards a more iterative hardware cycle.
Analysts are predicting we could see the PlayStation 5 anywhere between 2018 and 2019. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, analyst Damian Thong (who previously predicted the PS4 Pro and Slim) suggested that the console would arrive in the latter half of 2018.
Another analyst, however, believes we’ll have to wait a little longer. Speaking to GamingBolt, Michael Pachter said that though he thinks the PS5 will be a half step and will be backwards compatible with the PS4 Pro he doesn’t think we’ll see it until «2019 or 2020 but probably 2019.»
This slightly later release, he says, would make more sense as it would fall in line with predictions for when the 4K TV market in the US will reach 50%. «I think Sony has probably got the next console cycle lined up already», he says, «I think they already know what they’ve got to do.»
When Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, was asked about the PS5, he responded that he thought the PS5 was a question of ‘if’ rather than ‘when’
Though Sony currently has the most powerful console on the market with its PS4 Pro, Microsoft is about to throw a spanner into the works with its Xbox One X (due in November 2017) , and that might spell trouble for Sony.
But just because Microsoft launches a system doesn’t mean that Sony will counter immediately – there are good reasons to believe that Sony is less comfortable with the idea of taking a mobile phone-style “upgrade every year” approach to consoles in the future, including comments from Yoshida himself.
Also, it boils down to simple economics: it’s well documented that the longer a console can persist on the high-street shelves, the more profitable it becomes, as economies of scale reduce manufacturing costs, while a large installed base means publishers can sell more copies of their latest games.
For right now, at least, we don’t have all the answers.
But instead of twiddling our thumbs and waiting for Sony to plop the next system on our laps, we’ve done some digging to try and get to the bottom of the mystery that’s kept us up at night: What is the PS5 and when is it coming out?
Its “checkerboard” technique of taking single pixels and using each to render four pixels in 4K resolution is clever, but now 4K TV sales are gaining traction, it’s reasonable to expect console technology to advance to a level at which it can display 4K output natively.
Chris Kingsley, CTO and co-founder of developer Rebellion, dangles an even more ambitious technological carrot in front of a putative PS5: “Obviously new hardware should be able to support 4K TVs and possibly even 8K TVs at a push!”
Native 4K support, surely, will be a basic requirement of the PlayStation 5? And if Sony cracks that particular problem with alacrity, it could even mean that a PlayStation 5 will arrive sooner than anticipated.
Sony recently became the first console manufacturer to embrace virtual reality, thanks to the PlayStation VR, but if you examine PlayStation VR closely – and observe how it operates on the PS4 Pro – it invites speculation about how a PS5 might take VR to a new level.
Currently, PlayStation VR operates at lower resolution than the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive – but, as it stands, even its current incarnation almost pushes the base PlayStation 4 beyond its limits. Running a PlayStation VR on a PS4 Pro brings improved frame-rates, which are very handy indeed in terms of the overall VR experience, but even the PS4 Pro can’ t overcome the resolution constraints set by the PlayStation VR headset.
Sony will want to return to the market with a second, markedly higher-tech iteration of PlayStation VR
So it’s a good bet that, presuming PlayStation VR is successful (and it already appears to be catching on) Sony will want to return to the market with a second, markedly higher-tech iteration: which would provide an obvious selling point for the PlayStation 5.
And if a PlayStation VR 2 headset could be sold without an external black box, it should be markedly cheaper, further accelerating VR’s march into the mainstream.
Rebellion’s Kingsley makes another good point about second-generation VR. “Anything that reduces the leads has to be a good thing, ” he says.
The umbilical cord which currently attaches VR headset-wearers to their consoles or PCs obviously goes against VR’s entire immersive nature, and we’ re already beginning to see, for example, a third-party implementation for the HTC Vive that renders it wireless. It’s a safe bet that the capacity for running a wireless PlayStation VR 2 will be built into the PS5.
But Kingsley’s PlayStation VR 2 wish-list goes further: “Wide vertical and horizontal field-of-view would be top of my list, and of course, that would require 4K resolution per eye, and high dynamic range would be great too.”
HDR and wider fields of view should be achievable but sadly, we don’ t reckon full 4K VR is likely to be a possibility even for the PS5. As Kingsley points out, that would require 4K rendering per eye, which equates to 8K rendering overall, which we expect to be beyond the PS5’s capabilities.
That said, perhaps Sony will find some clever technological bodge to get around that before it releases its fifth PlayStation console.
It has been suggested that future consoles could take radically different forms to current ones, thanks to advances in cloud computing bringing about the ability to stream games, thereby doing away with the components that make consoles so bulky. But we don’ t reckon Sony will take a more Nintendo-like approach and put the PS5 in a tiny box.
One reason for that is that with the PS4, Sony has only just committed to using what are basically the innards of a PC – the first three PlayStation variants used proprietary components which, in the PS3, were so esoteric that the console flopped. Developers, certainly, are massively relieved that the PS4 took the PC route.
«We always want fast CPUs and GPUs, but lots of fast RAM is also very important – it’s no use having fast processors if they are starved of data.”
“Developers want the ability to make the best games using the minimum amount of effort. We want to focus on being creative and getting things to just work, ” Kingsley says. “So the hardware should be based around current console hardware, which is in turn based on PC hardware. We always want fast CPUs and GPUs, but lots of fast RAM is also very important – it’s no use having fast processors if they are starved of data.”
All the above are achievable, but will the PS5 still have a hard disk?
Sony Computer Entertainment President and CEO Andrew House spoke at the PS4’s launch about how deciding to put hard disks and 8Gb of RAM in the PS4 were both “Billion-dollar decisions”. Yet any PS4 owner will tell you that the aspect of the console they hate most is its wilful inability (unlike the Xbox One variants) to accommodate external USB hard disks.
Given that 4K games by definition contain much more data than 1080p ones, that issue will become exacerbated if a native 4K PS5 arrives.
