Vi har sedan april vetat att Sony arbetar på ett nytt Playstation och många har spekulerat i att den nya konsolen ska släppas till julhandeln 2020, vilket nu bekräftas av spelföretaget.

Vi får också veta att den nya kontrollen, som kan komma att heta Dualshock 5, kommer att ersätta rumble-teknologin med hauptisk feedback. Enligt Sony ger det detta möjlighet att en mer varierad känsla. De har också arbetat om L2/R2-trigger-knapparna så att utvecklare kan ställa in trögheten.

The second innovation is something we call adaptive triggers, which have been incorporated into the trigger buttons (L2/R2). Developers can program the resistance of the triggers so that you feel the tactile sensation of drawing a bow and arrow or accelerating an off-road vehicle through rocky terrain. In combination with the haptics, this can produce a powerful experience that better simulates various actions. Game creators have started to receive early versions of the new controller, and we can’t wait to see where their imagination goes with these new features at their disposal.

I en färsk artikel på Wired berättar Sonys hårdvaruarkitekt Mark Cerny mer om några av de saker som avslöjades i deras publicering i april, då vi fick de första detaljerna kring Playstation 5. Bland annat att konsolen kommer att ha dedikerad hårdvara för ray tracing, något AMD:s nuvarande grafikkretsar inte har.

Vidare pratar han om SSD-tekniken som en dörröppnare för att snabba upp hela systemet och han använder återigen Marvel's Spider-Man som exempel.

Think about the hard drive in a game console, spinning like a 5400-rpm vinyl record. For the console to read a piece of information off the drive, it first has to send out the disk head—like a turntable needle—to find it. Each “seek,” as it’s known, may only entail a scant handful of milliseconds, but seeks add up. To minimize them, developers will often duplicate certain game assets in order to form contiguous data blocks, which the drive can read faster. We’re talking common stuff here: lampposts, anonymous passersby.

But data adds up too. "If you look at a game like Marvel's Spider-Man," Cerny says, "there are some pieces of data duplicated 400 times on the hard drive." The SSD sweeps away the need for all that duping—so not only is its raw read speed dramatically faster than a hard drive, but it saves crucial space. How developers will take advantage of that space will likely differ; some may opt to build a larger or more detailed game world, others may be content to shrink the size of the games or patches. Either way, physical games for the PS5 will use 100GB optical disks, inserted into an optical drive that doubles as a 4K Bluray player.

Artikeln tar också upp ovan nämnda nya kontroll och ger oss några fler detaljer. Den laddas med USB-C, är något tyngre än tidigare Dualshock 4 tack vare ett biffigare batteri samt de nya hauptiska feedback-motorerna. Skribenten fick möjlighet att testa dels ett specialskrivet demo från skaparna av Astrobot samt en portad version av Gran Turismo Sport.

First, I play through a series of short demos, courtesy of the same Japan Studio team that designed PlayStation VR's Astro Bot Rescue Mission. In the most impressive, I ran a character through a platform level featuring a number of different surfaces, all of which gave distinct—and surprisingly immersive—tactile experiences. Sand felt slow and sloggy; mud felt slow and soggy. On ice, a high-frequency response made the thumbsticks really feel like my character was gliding. Jumping into a pool, I got a sense of the resistance of the water; on a wooden bridge, a bouncy sensation.

Next, a version of Gran Turismo Sport that Sony had ported over to a PS5 devkit—a devkit that on quick glance looks a lot like the one Gizmodo reported on last week. (The company refused to comment on questions about how the devkit's form factor might compare to what's being considered for the consumer product.) Driving on the border between the track and the dirt, I could feel both surfaces. Doing the same thing on the same track using a DualShock 4 on a PS4, that sensation disappeared entirely. It wasn't that the old style rumble feedback paled in comparison, it was that there was no feedback at all. User tests found that rumble feedback was too tiring to use continuously, so the released version of GT Sport simply didn't use it.

Det dröjer alltså ytterligare innan precis alla detaljer kring Playstation 5 blir officiella så de två stora punkterna från dagens avslöjande är dels dedikerad ray tracing-hårdvara och dels den första informationen kring "Dualshock 5". Det har tidigare ryktats att Sony ska avtäcka Playstation 5 lite mer ceremoniellt i februari nästa år, vilket var samma månad som Playstation 4 avtäcktes.