That's right, the PS5 release date has just been dropped. Sony has confirmed the next-generation PlayStation console has finally got a release window for "Holiday 2020" – and will officially be called the PlayStation 5 too.
We already had word of the next-gen Xbox, Xbox Project Scarlett, coming in Holiday 2020, but Sony had bade its time with the announcement until now. That's one whole year until the PS5 could land, with anywhere from late October to mid December being possible in that time frame, clearly angling for the heavy Holiday sales period.
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A blog post by PlayStation confirms the PS5 release date, with mentions of specific hardware capabilities for the upcoming PlayStation console, including a new DualShock controller that replaces "rumble" features with more precise haptic feedback, and "adaptive triggers" that can recreate different levels of resistance for different weapon loadouts or types of terrain you might be navigating in-game.
The blog post reads: "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."
Going hard on hardware
We already know quite a bit about the PlayStation 5's hardware, including its 8K capability and continued VR support for the PlayStation platform, and it's clear that there'll be quite a jump in processing power, and in turn a vast change in the scale and visual quality of the game world players can inhabit.
But getting the PS5 release date, as well as confirmation of new advances for the DualShock controller, show a new console generation finally coming into focus.
In an exclusive story for Wired, PS5 system architect Mark Cerny revealed some other tidbits about the PS5's architecture, saying that the ray tracing feature we'd heard of previously – which allows for more advanced visual and audio effects in the game engine – would also be a built-in hardware feature rather than merely a software addition:
"There is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware [...] which I believe is the statement that people were looking for.”
We also learned that haptic feedback for the new DualShock controller could have been introduced back at the PS4 Pro launch, but that Sony wished to avoid too much of a "split experience" for gamers.
