PS5 release date news – PlayStation 5 not coming in 2019 says Sony as it reveals first details
ALREADY hankering for a console upgrade? You'll be glad to hear Sony has officially confirmed its next-generation console and offered up the first official details about it.
We've scoured the web for the latest PlayStation 5 news, bringing you all the PS5 release date rumours, plus chatter on specs, price and more.
PS5 release date – when is the PlayStation 5 out?
This is the big question – when can you actually buy a PlayStation 5?
Sony is playing its cards close to its chest, so we won't have strict confirmation for a while yet. But all signs currently point to a 2020 launch.
Revealing the first details to Wired, Sony has confirmed it isn't coming out in 2019.
Sony is skipping E3 in 2019 because "they’ve pretty much announced all the games for this generation" according to , an analyst at Wedbush Securities.
The sheer number of unannounced games that must equate to, and the lack of anything in the schedule much past the end of this year, definitely indicates an imminent announcement and 2020 launch.
US retailer GameStop seems to agree, ahead of a 2020 release for the new devices.
Leaks are starting to come with information about hardware specifications, while others purport to show what the new controller might look like, and more -- suggesting that launch is indeed edging ever closer.
Sony's slipping profits from its gaming division also mean there must be huge pressure from the bean counters to get a new box out the door.
Will it be able to play PS4 games?
Yes, it will.
The first official revelations confirmed it would be fully backwards-compatible with all PS4 games.
A patent revealed last year but filed in 2016 outlined some pretty nifty technology for automatically increasing the quality of older games when played on a newer networked system.
It showed off the ability to replace textures and audio files on the fly with higher-quality versions as they became available.
The possibilities of this for backwards-compatible games are obvious, but the timing of the original filing doesn't suggest it's got much to do with PS5 plans specifically.
Another patent filed in 2019 suggested that the PS5 processor would be able to pretend to be the processors from older consoles, and thus play their games natively.
PS5 chips and other hardware information
It was suggested the PS5 is code-named Erebus, after the fifth greek deity to come into existence, but that's best-guess speculation based on publicly available information rather than a leak from a trusted source.
A Russian site, meanwhile, released what it claims were details of the PlayStation 5 based on information it had received from an "anonymous" source.
The site published photos of the supposed device alongside some technical specifications and what it claimed was a screenshot of part of the menu system.
The now-retracted also included the claim that the PS5 would come equipped with an eight-core Ryzen chipset using Zen+ architecture.
Some time after publishing their original story and it being picked up quite widely, Rozetked updated it with a correction.
"Unfortunately, the leak turned out to be a fake. Sorry for the false information," the amendment read.
However, Sony has since officially confirmed that the PS5 WILL be running using Ryzen CPU and Navi GPU, using the Zen 2 architecture.
It had also been reported that AMD's Gonzalo chip will be at the console's heart -- and that will be an eight-core chip from AMD's 7nm line that Ryzen is part of.
The new Navi architecture offers 1.5x the performance per Watt of the chips running the PS4, and users will see 1.25x performance per clock cycle -- as well as getting more cycles per second to play with.
PS5 news and specs rumours – what do we know about PlayStation 5 features, games and graphics?
Graphics-wise we now know the PS5 will support games running in 8K
There's very little in the way of hard facts about Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5 – but there are some obvious improvements to be made.
For instance, the Sony PS4 Pro shipped without a 4K Blu-ray player, which many saw as a big mistake.
By contrast, both the Xbox One S and Xbox One X can play 4K Blu-ray discs, which means they don't have to fork out for a dedicated player as well.
For the PlayStation 5, we'd be very surprised if a 4K Blu-ray player didn't come built in as standard, particular as Sony is a major purveyor of 4K Blu-ray discs.
We'd also guess that Sony will ramp up the storage capacity of its console for the PlayStation 5.
The PS4 Pro is currently only available in 500GB and 1TB versions, but the file sizes of popular games are ballooning.
Games like Battlefield and Call of Duty can easily consume more than 50GB of space, and native 4K video games will be even heavier.
When next-generation titles roll around, we'd imagine Sony will be looking at handling their big file sizes with a 2TB console, which is great news for gamers.
The only other obvious improvement would be to boost the console's overall performance to ship quality PlayStation 5 graphics.
Sony currently uses a high-end AMD Radeon graphics card in the PS4 Pro, so we'd expect to see a newer-generation version of this in Sony's next console.
PS5 price UK – how much will the PlayStation 5 cost?
The original PlayStation 4 cost £349 at launch, which was the same as the newer PS4 Pro.
By contrast, Microsoft's new Xbox One X started shipping at £449, which is a huge price for a games console.
Sadly, we'd expect that future Sony consoles will be closer to the starting price of the Xbox One X than its predecessors.
Sony will be shipping its next console with high-end components in a bid to trump Xbox – and these powerful graphics cards and processors won't come cheap.
What new features do you think the PlayStation 5 will get? Let us know in the comments!
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