It is the rarest of thrills for game enthusiasts, the giddiness of unboxing a new console. It brings the promise of previously unseen wonders and the excitement of being part of the “next big thing.”
Both Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X are arriving within days, for those lucky enough to procure a rare preorder. For the rest of us, is it worth the continuous effort to track them down? To put it one another way, what is really new about these new consoles? Today, I will take a look at what PlayStation 5 brings to the living room.
1. Graphical Horsepower
The obvious draw to new game hardware is the most easily seen when you power up the system. It is the raw power that the machine has, the graphics it can push to your television. Mathematically there is a clear progression in GPUs (graphical processing unit), looking at TFLOPs, or trillions of floating point operations per second — a measurement of how much information the processor can handle. The original PS4 was 1.8 TFLOPS, and the PS4 Pro was 4.2 TFLOPS. The PS5 is 10.3 TFLOPS. There have also been upgrades in other technical specifications along the way too, such as CPU, RAM, etc.
What does this all mean in practice? Most obvious is that a game can have a larger, fuller world with more characters, objects, and detail. On a technical level, while PS4 could only do games at typical HD resolutions, PS4 Pro could do them at Ultra HD resolutions, aka 4K. What PS5 brings to the table, besides the 4K, is an increased framerate. Whereas most games run at 30 frames per second, with the extra power, PS5 is more reliable in bringing the smoother 60fps graphics. Everything moves silkier, and gameworlds just seem more present.
Read the full article at Medium.