Both Sony and Microsoft have indicated that in time for the holiday festivities of 2020, their respective next-generation gaming consoles will hit the market, but the definite launch date remains unknown. Thankfully, some of the juicy details about the devices have started trickling out that gaming fans have something to base for comparison.
Sony said the PS5 would be a focused machine that will satisfy the cravings of "hardcore gamers who obsess over the latest features," and this is according to the report by Forbes, which added that the device is designed as "a niche product aimed at serious players."
This aligned with the recent admission by the company that for horsepower, the PS5 will be fired up by the upcoming Navi family of processing chips from AMD and with ample support provided by GDDR6 of RAM technology. Per Polygon, it will be the same hardware implementation for the PS5 rival that is internally referred to by Microsoft as Project Scarlett.
Scarlett, according to the same report, will share the same chips technology sourced from AMD, and that would be Navi processors as mentioned above and GPU that is based on third-generation Ryzen architecture. As a result, both consoles will be capable of processing 8K visuals and real-time ray tracing.
The latter is touted to enhance the visual experience for gamers' ultimate delight.
To differentiate from the older consoles, both the new PlayStation and Xbox will make use of the most advanced storage tech available, which is a solid state drive (SSD). With SSD under the hood, both gaming machines are expected to impress with faster loading times, which something that has been a major letdown in the previous makes.
And likely as an additional wow factor, there will be backward compatibility feature for both devices, according to Business Insider. Sony said would-be buyers of the PS5 would be happy to know that their PS4 game titles will play on the newer console. But that's it as there is no provision for older titles, designed for the first three PlayStation consoles, to be accommodated by the PS5.
On this, the Xbox Scarlett enjoys a slight edge as Microsoft has already confirmed the machine will take on game titles that were developed for the Xbox One and Xbox 360.
As for the services that presently exist on both gaming platforms, it is expected that they will simply migrate to the upcoming consoles in a seamless fashion. This means that Xbox Live and PlayStation Plus will most likely find their way to their next-gen counterparts.
Lastly, when it comes to supported game titles, it should be the same protocol with the current console versions. There will be games that will release exclusive to the PS5, and the same goes for Project Scarlett. For the massively popular titles such as "Call of Duty," "FIFA," "Madden," and "Assassin's Creed," gamers can expect them to rock on both platforms.
