The day has finally come, and some six years on from the launch of the PlayStation 3, Sony has officially revealed the PlayStation 4. The console previously known as ‘Orbis’ is now real, but it’s not just the home console that Sony has re-imagined.
Sony likes to call the console itself a sort-of ‘supercharged PC’, with a 8-core x86 processor at the very core. It’s also got an ‘enhanced PC GPU that uses powerful GDDR5 memory to provide incredible amounts of video bandwidth, opening the gates for even more realistic games. There’s also 8GB of high speed unified RAM and a hard drive for local storage, although we don’t know the size of that just yet.
Sony also revealed the controller for the PS4, and it looks very similar to the prototype we recently saw. It’s called the DualShock 4, and it’s similar to the classic PS controller but has plenty of new features. There’s a PS Vita-like touchpad in the area between the D Pad and the classic four buttons, a share button, a headphone jack and a light bar – this merely uses different coloured lights to identify different players.
There was also a Kinect-style camera that detects the positioning of the DualShock 4 controller, allowing for motion control and various other features. This was only touched on briefly, however.
Sony has revamped the user interface, social networking, online gameplay and digital downloads. A secondary chip in the console means that you’ll be able to download games from the PlayStation Store at the same time as playing a local game. It also means that you can start playing a new game before it’s even finished downloading.
Stay tuned for even more about the console, the PlayStation Network and all things new that Sony has to throw at us tonight.
Read up on all the specs, all the launch games and more from Sony’s event right here.