PLAY STATION 5 PS4

As a new take on the highly regarded 2018 PS4 Spider-Man game, it's not going to blow your mind with new ideas, but it's a great example of a high-gloss, fast-paced action game to show off the hardware. I also got a chance to play the new Spider-Man: Miles Morales game.

My favorite experience was having to squeeze the trigger on the DualSense controller until I could break a glass sphere. Yes, it's the same little robots from the Playroom on the PS4. The simple landscapes and characters don't necessarily show off the PS5 GPU, but the controller feels great, and both the motion controls and force feedback are used as unique game elements.

It's a smart, classic platformer that will feel familiar to fans of the genre. Astro's Playroom is largely meant as a demo reel for the new controller. It's something you don't see very often anymore, but the PlayStation 5 comes with a preinstalled game (we used to call this a pack-in). Dan Ackerman/CNET Playing native PS5 games

PLAY STATION 5 SERIES

The PS5 is a games-at-heart machine, while the Xbox Series X is more of a console-as-ecosystem, leaning heavily into multimedia, community, cloud gaming and cross-platform continuity. The real difference is one of temperament. It will be a couple of years at least before any new game comes close to pushing the boundaries of this hardware, so don't get caught up with teraflops or core frequencies. The first console launch I covered as a reviewer was the Sega Dreamcast in 1999, and I've heard the same debate for every console generation since. You can go down this 'which is more powerful' rabbit hole, and stay there, for a very long time. Technically, the PS5 has a higher throughput speed from its SSD than the Xbox Series X, but then again, the Xbox GPU can, on paper, calculate more operations per second. Both also offer default solid-state drives for storage (versus the spinning platter hard drives of the 2013 PS4 and Xbox One), and that makes for a huge improvement in loading times. You can read a much deeper dive into the components of both new game consoles here, but the key takeaway is both new PlayStation and Xbox systems are built on very similar platforms. In this case, it's a custom eight-core AMD Zen 2 CPU and a GPU based on AMD's RDNA 2 graphics architecture. Inside the towering tower, the PS5 is powered by AMD components - as was the PS4, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. The PS5 is actually just about the same size as the Xbox Series X, if you count cubic volume. Judging by the front of the box and Sony's promotional art, that's how the company intends for you to use it. It stands 16 inches (40.6 cm) in its vertical position. Its AMD-powered GPU can process 10.28 teraflops versus 1.84 teraflops in the original PS4 (each TF represents about 1 trillion operations per second). The powerful new PlayStation 5 console towers over its predecessor, both physically and in its forward-looking graphics capabilities. Read More: PS5 Restock Tracker: Where to find a consoleĪnd it was right to be worried. The seven-year-old system still played games fine, but the optical drive mechanism grew confused, giving off random beeps, as if it were trying to eject a ghost disc. It was a launch-day PlayStation 4 from 2013, and it worked great right up until the last few months, like it knew it was about to get the Marie Kondo treatment and replaced by the new, much-advanced PS5. Some games force you to choose between resolution, frame rate and ray tracing

I don't love the clunky-feeling plastic stand The bold design is borderline impractical for small spaces Included Astro's Playroom game is fantastic

Play station 5