What you need to know
- Sony revealed the final design of the PlayStation 5 today.
- It is a departure from the leaked dev kit designs that have been floating around for months now.
- Compared to the Xbox Series X design, it is much slimmer.
It's been a long time coming but we now know what the PS5 looks like thanks to an official reveal from Sony during its Future of Gaming event, part of Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest. As most people had assumed, it's definitely a departure from the leaked devkit that made the rounds months ago, and it sports a sleek look like the DualSense controller that will accompany it.
It was also revealed that an all-digital edition of the PS5 will be making its way to store shelves. This seems to be following what Microsoft did with the Xbox One S all-digital edtion.
In addition to the console's design, we know that the PlayStation features an 825GB SSD and runs at 10.28 TFLOPS (variable) at 2.23 GHz with a Custom RDNA 2 GPU. Both its CPU and GPU are less powerful than the Xbox Series X on paper, but it makes up for some of that with an impressive I/O throughput of 5.5GB/s (Raw) and 8-9GB/s (Compressed). Epic also showcased 9 minutes of Unreal Engine 5 running in real-time on Sony's machine recently.
Sony has yet to clarify what kind of cooling system it will use. Considering the power it takes to run a machine like this, it's going to get very hot very quick. The company will need to mitigate this at every point possible to keep it running at maximum performance. Sony is expected to reveal more about the PlayStation 5 in the coming months over the course of the summer.
Despite the current global pandemic we all find ourselves in, Sony still appears to be planning a holiday 2020 release for the PlayStation 5 — though supply could be more limited than usual. This puts it right on track with the Xbox Series X launch. Should anything get delayed, we'll be sure to keep you up to date on all information.
