Sony to host PlayStation 5 showcase this week

Sony has announced that it will hold a PlayStation 5 showcase on Wednesday 16 September.

The presentation, which will span about 40 minutes, will provide updates regarding the latest games from Sony’s development partners.

The event will be streamed on Twitch and YouTube at 22:00 South African time.

Sony did not provide any information regarding whether it would unveil the release date and pricing for the PlayStation 5 console, but it is likely that Sony will do so in response to Microsoft’s recent announcement.

The PlayStation 5 will come in two iterations – a regular PlayStation, and a disc-less digital edition.

When Sony does announce its pricing, it will be competing with the Xbox Series X and S, which will be priced at $499 and $299 respectively.

The latter does not allow for 4K gaming but could be an attractive option for those who aren’t willing to spend much more than this on a console.

Rumours have suggested that the standard PlayStation 5 will cost the same as the Xbox Series X – $499 – while the digital version would cost slightly less, but much more than the Xbox Series S.

Specifications

Sony previously unveiled the specifications of the PlayStation 5.

The PlayStation 5 will provide 10.28 teraflops of graphics processing power and features an AMD RDNA 2 GPU with 36 compute units clocked at 2.23GHz.

The CPU is a custom 8-core AMD Zen 2 unit that has been clocked at 3.5GHz and will run at variable frequencies.

The console will also offer 16GB of GDDR6 RAM along with an 825GB SSD which will be able to deliver bandwidth of 5.5GB/s.

Additionally, Sony will allow users to expand their storage with an NVMe SSD expansion slot or by using an external HDD through USB.

The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X specifications are compared below.