After its launch in US, people have been anxiously waiting for PS4’s launch in India as well. Finally, PlayStation 4 has been launched in India and will be available in stores from January 6th. An improvement over the previous PlayStation 3, the console is priced quite steeply at Rs. 39,999. The games for the console will be sold at Rs. 3,499.
Sony Playstation 4 is perhaps the most powerful gaming console (leaving PCs aside). It is also the first time that Sony has shifted to x86 architecture. PS4 has AMD’s 8-core 64-bit x86 ‘Jaguar’ processor.
Also, it has 8 GB of GDDR5 memory to assist the processor along with AMD’s next generation Radeon GPU. A 500 GB hard disk will be there to save the data and of course, it is equipped with Blu-ray Disc drive.
These are the innards that will help PS4 run the awesome graphics that will be thrown at it by the new games. For connectivity, PS4 has USB 3.0, Aux, Ethernet, IEEE 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth and HDMI out port. It has basically everything latest in its repository.
Sony has made changes in its controller and now the new Dualshock4 comes with a wide array of new features. Touch has shown its impact here as well with a touchpad finding its way into the controller. It would add to the input methods for the user. Also, there is a light bar glowing with a blue light (for the PS camera to track the player) and a headphone jack and also present is a share button on the controller that allows user to share pictures and videos on Facebook (and just Facebook as of now).
There is no doubt that this is a worthy update to PS3. I have been playing on PS3 for a long time now and with the kind of graphics that it was able to churn out, I am thrilled just thinking about what PS4 will be capable of doing. Theoretically it is capable of 10x graphics performance.
There are a few niggles here and there (mostly firmware issues), like sharing not available for Youtube or any other social site except Facebook. Also, it won’t play Youtube Videos (something I have been doing on my HDTV with my PS3) as of now as the PS4 web browser would not support Flash.
With the speed companies are abandoning flash, it really needs to do something to save itself from extinction. Also, as the games are sporadic as of now. They will be launching in the coming months but as of now, the options are limited.
All in all, PS4 is on a great start but like every electronic device to be ever launched (including the legendary iPhone), a few firmware upgrades and perhaps a second revision would scale it to new heights. Also, it would take the developers some time to harness the full power under the hood.
My opinion: Wait a few months (a year perhaps) to get the best version of PS4. If however, you have enough money to know what to do about, game on! You won’t be disappointed.
Great article Kunal! Can you please share your email id?
I was wondering if x86 architecture together with 8GB of RAM is a good idea…. As far as my limited knowledge goes, x86 architecture can support only upto 4GB of RAM.