PlayStation fans have been eagerly awaiting news about the upcoming PlayStation 4 unveiled in February. Now a few more tidbits have trickled in from Sony at the 2013 Game Developers Conference.
As far as hardware goes, reports from the GDC indicate that the PlayStation 4 will have an AMD Jaguar processor with eight cores, a 64-bit x86 architecture and 2MB L2 cache for each of the four groups. It will include 8 GB of GDDR5 RAM as well as an AMD Radeon-based graphics card at 1.84 TFLOPS.
It was also indicated that the system's developer tools will run on Windows 7 64-bit. Other tools like PlayStation Shader Language are integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and 2012. The Shader Language will be comparable to or even better than OpenGL 4.0 and DirectX 11. Also included is Tessellation support.
The controller for the PlayStation 4 will be the new DualShock 4. It comes with new features including a "share" button, touchpad, light bar and speaker and headphone jack. With the share button, a player can save and upload the previous few minutes of play time. The feature can be used with Facebook as well as for streaming game sessions in real-time with Ustream or something similar. The controller's light bar works in conjunction with the system's Eye Camera, which detects the location of other players. The light bar then changes color based on the position of the characters. Changes in a character's health also will be reflected in the color and pattern of the light bar.
A release date for the Playstation 4 was not announced at GDC, but expect it to arrive sometime in the fourth quarter. Sony's competitor Microsoft is expected to reveal the Xbox 720 in the coming months.
