Gaming

Sony reveals the PlayStation 4 ahead of holiday 2013 launch (updated)

Eight cores, “state of the art” GPU, and GDDR5, but no PS3 support at launch.

Kyle Orland – Feb 20, 2013 5:09 pm | 291

Sony has officially started the transition from the PlayStation 3 era with tonight’s announcement of the PlayStation 4 at a press event in New York City.

“Today marks a moment of truth and a bold step forward for Sony as a company,” Sony Computer Entertainment President Andrew House said. “The living room is no longer the center of the PlayStation ecosystem; the player is.”

“It’s conceived as the most personal gaming experience available today… This is the foundation of our next generation platform, PlayStation 4,” House said.

Hardware

Crash Bandicoot creator Mark Cerny discussed how the PS4 was needed to advance from the PS3, which came out as the uses of living room consoles were in flux.

“The architecture we chose is like a PC in many ways, but supercharged [for gaming],” Cerny said. He confirmed that the system will have an x86 processor and a “highly enhanced PC GPU” that will have “remarkable long-term potential.” The system will sport 8GB of high-speed unified memory and a hard drive for local storage.

That high-speed memory is actually GDDR5, which Sony says will offer 176GBps of bandwidth. The system will have eight CPU cores and a “state-of-the-art” GPU on a single die, offering 2 teraflops of performance, according to Cerny. To show off this processing power, Cerny showed a live demo of Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 running on development hardware.

UPDATE After the PlayStation Meeting event, Sony revealed the following spec sheet for the system. Of note are a confirmation of a “Jaguar” processor and AMD Radeon graphics chip, as well as the expected Blu-ray drive for physical game media:

Main Processor
Single-chip custom processor
CPU : x86-64 AMD “Jaguar”, 8 cores
GPU : 1.84 TFLOPS, AMD next-generation Radeon based graphics engine

Memory
GDDR5 8GB

Hard Disk Drive
Built-in

Optical Drive (read only)
BD 6xCAV
DVD 8xCAV

I/O
Super-Speed USB (USB 3.0), AUX
Communication 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)

The PS4 will offer a low-power sleep state, so it will have instant-on capabilities. There will also be background downloading when the console is asleep or even powered off. For DLC, gamers will be able to start playing once the download starts.

Always-on video compression and decompression systems allow players to share video immediately from recent gameplay and browse live gameplay video from friends or gaming celebrities, Cerny said. Players will be able to connect with people they know using “real names and profile pictures seeded from your existing social network.” The system will also be able to “learn your likes and dislikes” and pre-download content based on what it discerns of your tastes, à la TiVo.

For controls, Sony unveiled the DualShock 4, a significant redesign of its standard controller, sporting a front touch pad and a light for easy tracking by a new 3D camera.

PlayStation Cloud

Last year’s $380 million purchase of Gaikai will start paying off for Sony in the form of a Gaikai app on the PlayStation Store. The new service will let players try a wide variety of PlayStation 4 games immediately, with the push of a button and no download necessary— the games will be streamed from powerful central servers. Gaikai CEO David Perry talked up the experience of trying games, buying them if you like them, and sharing the experience with friends. “Only buy what you love,” he encouraged gamers.

A “PlayStation Cloud” service that has been “fully greenlit by Sony” will allow for streaming of many PlayStation 4 games, as well as some titles from previous PlayStation generations. That will be the only way to play some older titles, though, as the PS4 will not support native play of PlayStation 3 titles at launch.

Moderators will be able to drop in and give capable players “director” powers to direct the broadcast of live gameplay or even affect that gameplay by dropping items into other players’ experiences.

Remote Play

Remote Play capability is being built deeply into the PlayStation 4 experience, Perry said, allowing people to transfer the PS4 experience directly to their Vita on a local network. “We’re using the full graphical capabilities of the PlayStation 4,” Cerny said during a demo of the feature. Perry said the team has been able to “dramatically reduce transmission times,” with Remote Play using Gaikai technology, in essence making the PS4 a server and the Vita a client. “Our long-term goal is to make every PlayStation 4 title playable on the PlayStation Vita,” he said.

UPDATE: After the event, a press sheet detailed how the PlayStation 4 would also support “second screen” gameplay through the iOS and Android phones and tablets, using a PlayStation app. The app will also allow users to buy games when on the go and have them automatically downloaded to their PS4 at home, or watch other PS4 players.

Emotion through technology

Heavy Rain creator David Cage came out to tell the audience that “to get the player emotionally involved is the holy grail of all game creators.” Technology is important to this emotional process, he pointed out, as advancements from silent black and white films to today’s high-definition blockbusters have shown, he said.

On PlayStation 4, Cage says it will be possible to go past the 30,000 polygons of the characters in games like Beyond: Two Souls to highly realistic, real-time characters that are only possible on CGI movies currently. “We start to reach a point where you can see very subtle emotions on the face of the character… where you can see his soul just looking in his eyes… We are now only limited by our imagination.”

Content creation with Move

Media Molecule representative Alex Heavens came out to talk about using the Move controller to “create your dreams.” According to Heavens, three-dimensional game creation tools haven’t changed very much in recent years, thanks to what he called “the tyranny of the polygon.” It takes way too long to make basic stuff with current tools, he said. “How can we scoop away the techy mess?”

The answer he came to, after two years of research, was the Move controller. He created a sculpting tool that lets the PlayStation 4 track every move you make to chip away at clay sculptures on the screen very quickly. With this, you “can put down your ideas as fast as you think of them,” he said.

Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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