At a glance:
PlayStation 4 is official: Details, games, videos & release date!
New DualShock controller & cloud gaming plans also revealed!
Sony Computer Entertainment president & group CEO “Andrew House” took to the stage at the Hammerstein Ballroom at Manhattan Center Studios in New York to reveal the name of Sony‘s next-gen console!
The exec said Sony’s “most powerful platform ever” will allow “worlds to come alive with greater fidelity & intensity than ever before”!
House also noted that “ease of access regardless of location or device has been a priority” in the system’s development”!
“Our vision for the future is consumer centric & developer inspired,” he added, stressing that Sony is keen to enable developers to utilise “new business models that enable more flexibility including episodic and free-to-play”!
Lead PS4 system architect “Mark Cerny” was up on stage next!
“We wanted to make sure nothing would come between the player, the platform & play,” he said. “Our main goal was to architect the system so as to support a breadth of experiences.”!
Boasting 8GB of unified system memory, PS4 houses a “highly enhanced” PC GPU “containing a unified array of 18 compute units, which collectively generate 1.84 Teraflops of processing power that can freely be applied to graphics, simulation tasks, or some mixture of the two”!
It is also “centred around a powerful custom chip that contains eight x86-64 cores & a state of the art graphics processor”.
Check out the full PS4 system specs further down the page!
“Cerny” then showed off the PS4 controller, “DualShock 4″, which will include many of the recently rumoured features.
It will offer enhanced rumble & reduced latency, a touchpad, a headphone jack and a new Share button, which will allow players to record gameplay or screenshots and share them instantly. “Our goal is to make the sharing of video on PS4 as popular as the sharing of screenshots is today,” he said. PS4 will also support cross-game chat!
The new pad was developed in tandem with the next iteration of Sony’s PS Eye camera, dubbed PlayStation 4 Eye.
Check the full DualShock 4 specs further down!
Sony also said PS4 radically reduces the lag time between players & their content.
The system utilises a “suspend mode” which keeps the console in a low power state while preserving game sessions. “The time it takes today to boot a console & load a saved game will be a thing of the past,”!
Users will also be able to boot applications including a web browser when playing PS4 games, while the system will enable titles to be downloaded or updated in the background, or in stand-by mode.
Digital titles will be playable while they’re downloading too, with only a “fraction” of data required to start a session.
Dave Perry, founder of cloud gaming platform Gaikai, which Sony acquired for $380 million last year, was up next on stage!
“What we’re creating is the fastest, most powerful gaming network in the world,”!
“With Gaikai & the PlayStation Store, you’ll be able to instantly experience games for free [only pay for the full experience if you want to].”
PlayStation cloud services will be rolled out in phases, with the ultimate goal being to give players access to all of their favourite PSone, PS2 & PS3 titles.
Perry also said PS4 will let other players look over your shoulder virtually as you’re playing, if you allow them to, post comments directly to your screen.
Friends will even be able to take over your controller virtually & help you complete a section you can’t do yourself.
Sony also said:
Vita, along with iOS & Android devices, will be capable of acting as second screens for PS4.
The new system will allow Vita users to “seamlessly pull PS4 titles from their living room TVs” & play them on the portable over Wi-Fi, while a PlayStation app will enable players to supplement their console gaming experience, “for example – displaying maps or inventory screens on supporting devices” (just like the WiiU)
Sony told us it’s planning for Killzone Shadow Fall & Drive Club to be PS4 launch games later this year.
Also:
MotorStorm developer Evolution Studios then unveiled Drive Club for PS4, The next-gen racer will focus on team-based online racing & will link to a companion app on smartphones as well as tablets, allowing players to have “24/7 untethered access to their club”.
Meanwhile, Final Fantasy brand director Shinji Hashimoto said Square Enix is developing a new entry in the series for PS4 using its next-gen Luminous engine, which it plans to show off at this year’s E3 in June.
Blizzard’s senior vice president of story & franchise development then revealed that Diablo 3 will launch on PS3 & PS4, with more details to be revealed in the coming months.
Bungie also offered a brief glimpse of Destiny, which will launch on PS3 & PS4 as well as other consoles, before confirming that the studio will be developing unspecified PlayStation exclusive content for the shooter.
Rounding things off, Media Molecule presented a PS Move PS4 tech demo & a Quantic Dream PS4 tech demo showed off the Heavy Rain developer’s “completely new engine”.
PlayStation 4 Details:
Single-chip custom processor
CPU : x86-64 AMD “Jaguar”, 8 cores
GPU : 1.84 TFLOPS, AMD next-generation Radeon based graphics engine
GDDR5 8GB
Hard Disk Drive
Optical Drive (read only)
BD 6xCAV
DVD 8xCAV
I/O
Super-Speed USB (USB 3.0), AUX
Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T)
IEEE 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth 2.1 (EDR)
AV output
HDMI
Analog-AV out
Digital Output (optical)
Wireless Controller for PlayStation 4 (DUALSHOCK 4) Details:
Approx. 162mm x 52mm x 98mm (width x height x depth) (tentative, excludes largest projection)
Approx. 210g (tentative)
PS button, SHARE button, OPTIONS button
Directional buttons (Up / Down / Left / Right)
Action buttons (Triangle, Circle, Cross, Square)
R1 / L1 / R2 / L2 button, Left stick / L3 button, Right stick / R3 button, Pad Button
Touch Pad
2 Point Touch Pad, Click Mechanism, Capacitive Type
Motion Sensor
Six-axis motion sensing system (three-axis gyroscope, three-axis accelerometer)
Other Features:
Light Bar, Vibration, Built-in Mono Speaker
Ports:
USB (Micro B), extension Port, Stereo Headset Jack
Wireless Communication
Bluetooth Ver2.1+EDR
Battery:
Type: Built-in Lithium-ion Rechargeable Battery
Voltage: DC3.7V (tentative)
Capacity: 1000mAh (tentative)
PlayStation 4 Eye Details:
Approx. 186mm x 27mm x 27mm (width x height x depth) (tentative)
Approx. 183g (tentative)
(Maximum) 1280 x 800 pixel x 2
1280×800 pixel @ 60fps
640×400 pixel @ 120fps
320×192 pixel @ 240fps
RAW, YUV (uncompressed)
Dual Lenses, F value/F2.0 fixed focus
30cm Range
85° Field of view
4 Channel Microphone Array
PS4 dedicated connector (AUX connector) Approx. 2m (tentative)
