The best new features from Sony's PlayStation 5 announcement

The PlayStation 5 will officially be launching in time for the 2020 holiday season, Sony have announced.

Sony's next-generation gaming console will offer improved graphics, decreased loading times and will ship with a new controller.

THE NEW CONTROLLER

To coincide with the next-gen console, Sony has created a new controller that promises to offer immersive gameplay.

"One of our goals with the next generation is to deepen the feeling of immersion when you play games, and we had the opportunity with our new controller to reimagine how the sense of touch can add to that immersion," PlayStation boss Jim Ryan wrote in a blog.

The new controller will say goodbye to the "rumble" technology found in controllers since the 5th generation of consoles and will introduce haptic feedback.

"With haptics, you truly feel a broader range of feedback, so crashing into a wall in a race car feels much different than making a tackle on the football field. You can even get a sense for a variety of textures when running through fields of grass or plodding through mud," he explained.

Sony will also introduce "adaptive triggers" into the L2/R2 buttons.

"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," he said.

"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."

The controller will also move from Micro USB to USB-C

WHAT ABOUT THE CONSOLE?

The PS5 will l ditch the spinning hard drive for a solid-state drive, which will offer better performance and reduce load times – Sony said it will be 10X faster than the predecessor.

Graphics are also set to get a boost, with the new console supporting 8K gaming and ray tracing –a rendering technique for generating lifelike images by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects.

The SSD will also give gamers more power over how their storage is managed. The company said players will be able to install individual game modes instead of having to download an entire game. This means if you're someone who only wants to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare online, you won't also be required to download the single player campaign.

Sony has also announced it will also revamp the user interface to launch directly into a game mode from the home screen, which would remove the need to launch the game before navigating to your selected mode from the in-game menu.

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