The gaming console industry is about to experience another
major revolution with the rumored arrival of the newest generation of consoles
from Sony and Microsoft. Sony is first on the line with the Sony PS4 scheduled
to be announced on February 20 in New York while Microsoft is rumored to make
public the arrival of the new Xbox by Q3 of 2013.
And as expected rumors and information leaks has spread over
the internet like wildfire as the said date draws near. But what should we
expect from these new generation of gaming consoles? In this week’s edition of
Tech Tuesdays on TFL, we’ve consolidated all information on the internet about
these two machines to give us a heads up on what’s to come.
SONY PLAYSTATION 4
The new Sony PlayStation 4 will be announced tomorrow
February 4, 2013 at Manhattan, New York. As for hardware specifications, it
will be powered by AMD’s x86 processors and will pack a Radeon GPU with 18 GCN
units. There’s probably 4-8GB of RAM of the GDDR5 variety and it has also been
rumored to pack around 1.84 teraflops of overall computation power.
As for the controllers, rumors suggest that the PS4
controller will have the same shape and relatively the same dimensions of
controllers from previous versions but will now have Vita-like touch sensitive
surfaces replacing the usual analog sticks we’ve seen in the past. There are
also rumors that it will also have remodeled shoulder buttons as well as an
interactive touchscreen at the middle where the start and select button used to
be.
Lastly, since the new console will use a new architecture,
Sony hopes to solve the problem of backward compatibility with the use of
streaming games over the internet. Yes, you heard it right. The PS4 is rumored
to have the capability to stream games, specifically those developed for
previous versions over the internet.
MICROSOFT XBOX 720
Microsoft on the other hand plans to release their next
generation Xbox gaming console before Christmas of 2013, so we should expect
its announcement by Q3 or early Q4 of this year. In contrast to the PlayStation
4, details about the Xbox 720 (assuming it will be called by that name) are still
in murky waters.
There’s not much about the new console that is certain for
now but according to rumors, the Xbox 720 will have relatively the same specs
as its rival – the PlayStation 4 in terms of hardware specifications. Both
consoles will be powered by AMD processors and will have powerful GPUs to
support graphics intensive games.
As for the controller, rumors suggest that the Xbox 720
might still use a control pad but more emphasis will be given to its Kinect motion
based controller technology which is not really that surprising as this
technology offers a lot of promise and applications that Microsoft sees as a
worthy investment for the future.
Reports also suggest that just like the PS4, the Xbox 720
will have a featured aimed at preventing the use of second hand games. This
would mean that users won’t be able to trade in old titles anymore in order to
raise funds to purchase new games. A related rumor also suggested that the new
console would need an active internet connection in order to play games. This
is to ensure that all games played will be tethered to a specific console
profile making it hard for anyone to resell games.
Lastly, reports suggest that the Xbox 720 might not be
called that way at all and that Microsoft is planning a different route in
terms of the name of its new machine. Popular codenames include the Xbox
Infinity and Xbox Loop.
What are your thoughts about the PS4 and the Xbox 720?
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