Sony just unveiled its next generation gaming console, the Playstation 4. Although it was foregone that the new system would be unveiled at tonight’s media event, speculation has turned to reality as Sony reveals details about this powerful system and all its bells and whistles.
Engadget reports that after an introduction from Sony Computer Entertainment President and CEO Andrew House, lead system architect Mark Cerny detailed the PS4’s development, which was five years in the making.
“We were able to create in PlayStation 4 a system by game creators, for game creators,” Cerny said. As far as specs, he said it runs on x86 architecture, a “highly enhanced” PC GPU (with “almost 2 teraflops of performance,” he added), an unknown amount of local HDD storage, and 8GB of GDDR5 system memory. Cerny next unveiled the DualShock 4, which looks an awful lot like the leaks we saw recently — it features a touchpad, a light bar, and what looks like rubberized grips. Otherwise, it looks an awful lot like a DualShock 3 with some new bells and whistles.
So far there are robust game streaming features, social media integration, the ability to play games as they are downloading and much much more.
One particularly interesting reveal, PS3 game will not be backwards compatible with the new console but all PS1, PS2 and PS3 games will be playable from the cloud. Also, the PS4 will have 16X more RAM than the Xbox 360 which will allow to start playing a game (“suspend/resume” functionality) as soon as you turn the power on.
Check out some photos of the event, hardware and software in the gallery. Or, watch a live stream of the event below.
Your move, Microsoft.
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Photos: Engadget, Gizmodo
