The PS5 is now available for pre-order at most major retailers. The digital-only edition is available for $399.99, and the disc edition is available for $499.99. The console will officially release on November 12th. Accessories like the DualSense controller, the Pulse 3D Wireless Headset, and the HD Camera are also available for pre-order. Retailers are selling out very quickly, so if you can’t get a console immediately, you can still consider getting an extra controller and other useful accessories.
Where to preorder the PS5
The PS5 is available to pre-order at Best Buy, Amazon, GameStop, and Walmart. The pre-orders are selling out very fast, with many stores running out of stock almost immediately. Some stores, like Walmart, are not going to have pre-order sales in physical stores. Walmart has already announced that due to the high demand, the pre-orders will only be available online to maintain customer safety during the coronavirus pandemic.
If you signed up for pre-order announcements on the Sony website, you should have a special invitation in your inbox to pre-order through the company. There are also several bundle deals available from GameStop that can include games like Spider-Man: Miles Morales if you are willing to pay a few hundred more dollars.
The price of the PS5
The PS5 will cost $499.99 for the disc edition and $399.99 for the digital edition. This puts the PS5 in a competitive range with the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X, which will release two days earlier on November 10th.
Earlier this year, we heard about new features such as the custom GPU and the new Tempest 3D AudioTech engine. These new features are supposed to be cutting edge developments and should help inform the development of future GPUs and audio drivers. However, the newest cutting edge features generally come with a large price tag. Mark Cerny, Sony’s lead system architect for the PS4 and PS5, stated that the price would be “appealing to gamers in light of its advanced feature set.”
Game Selection and Console Specs
Many game developers have announced that they are already developing some major titles for the console leading up to the release. Players can expect games like Horizon: Forbidden West and a Demon Souls remake to be released with, or shortly after, the console hits stores. The company has also announced that the console will be backward compatible with most PS4 games and accessories such as the DualShock 4 controller. The console will also be compatible with PSVR with a new version, PSVR 2, rumored to be in development.
The PS5 will feature an 8-core 3.5GHz AMD Zen 2 based CPU. It will also have 16GB of GDDR6 RAM with 448GB/s bandwidth, and AMD RDNA2 GPU with 10.28 TFLOPS of processing power and ray tracing, and an 825GB SSD. Much of this hardware has been custom made for the PS5 in collaboration with AMD and other hardware developers.
The choice to use only 825GB for storage has caused a few players to scratch their heads. Many of us are used to having large libraries of games that will eat up that space fairly quickly. Since the release of the previous generation of consoles, games have only gotten bigger in size and memory consumption. But Sony has stated that games for the console should actually be smaller and better optimized for their new SSD storage. The new console should be capable of loading 2GB of memory in a quarter of a second. New development engines will also allow game developers to use the new features and boosted speed of the PS5 while also being able to optimize storage space.
