If you’re not living under a rock, you’ll know about the rivalry between Xbox fans and Playstation fans. Especially this winter, with both the Xbox series X and Playstation 5 being released. If you’re not sure which to go for, here is everything you need to know to realise why you should buy the PS5.
Cost
PS5: £449.99
PS5 Digital: £359.99
If you’re worried about how much this piece of kit will cost you, Sony has your back. They’ve released not only a normal PS5, but the digital one too. This means that if you can’t fork out £449.99 for the ordinary PS5, you can pay the smaller cost of £359.99 instead. The cheaper version of the Playstation doesn’t have a disk drive, and instead, you can access games by digitally downloading them.
The specs
So let’s talk tech. What does the PS5 have to offer when we get down to the nitty-gritty bits? Well, if you have any idea what any of it means, it has the following:
- 8 Zen 2 3.5GHz Cores
- 10.28TFLOPS, 36 2.23GHz CUs
- 16GB GDDR6 Memory
- 448 GBs Memory Bandwidth
- 825 GB SSD Internal Storage
- SSD Slot
- USB HDD Support
- 4K UHD Blu-Ray Drive
All of this means that it can support 8K resolutions and ray tracing in PS5 games. This helps with visuals in the games, helping mimic light movements. They’ve also focussed more on audio in the PS5, so the experience will be amazing all around.
Design
The PS5 is different from its predecessors in that it’s a dual-colour black and white console, with matching accessories. It’s almost like they designed it to match the Playstation VR.
The controller has almost been changed completely, its got sleek, curvier edges with a black centre for the analog sticks and then a white casing on the rest of the handheld. But the whole white section of the console and controller are covered in little raised X, Triangle, Square and O marks.
The controller
The Controller itself, as well as being curvier, has features such as:
- Haptic feedback: the controller will deliver a range of sensations such as the slow grittiness of driving a car through mud, rumbles, etc.
- Adaptive triggers: the L2 and R2 buttons can match the tension of in-game actions (the difference between the trigger on a pistol versus the string on a bow)
- Create button: the share button has been replaced with the Create button
- Built-in microphone
Other accessories
To accompany the PS5, you can get a Pulse 3D wireless headset which offers 3D audio and noise-cancelling microphones, an HD Camera with 1080p lenses for streaming, a media remote to navigate movies, and a dual sense charging station for the controllers.
Backwards compatibility
The question with new consoles is always whether or not you can play your old games. With the PS5, there will be backwards compatibility for PS4 games, either through your library or insertion of the game disk. If you are looking for further back, it seems at the moment that you’ll have to go about it like on the PS4, by using PS Now. However, there are loads of new great games coming to PS5, like Horizon 2, and Cyberpunk 2077.
