Sony’s PlayStation 4 Will Launch “This Holiday Season” For $399, $100 Less Than Xbox One

ollowing up on their oddly detail-light press conference a few months back, Sony used their E3 press conference this evening to finally disclose a bunch of important details: the price, a launch window, and, at long last, what the PlayStation 4 will look like.

The PlayStation 4 will launch in the US for $399 “this holiday season”. Alas, that’s as specific as they got regarding the timing.

Microsoft’s Xbox One, meanwhile, will launch in the US in November for $499. This brings the PS4 in at a full one hundred bucks cheaper than the One, with the One already facing its fair share of criticism.

Sony specifically targeted many of the things that the Xbox One has been lampooned for, from its seeming lack of support for independent developers, to its publisher-set restrictions on the selling and trading of used games, to its requirement that gamers periodically connect their consoles to the Internet to authenticate their games. Sony says that the PS4 will have “no restrictions” on used games, and that no PS4 game will require online authentication. Sony just won a lot of fans.

The biggest surprise of the night? Just how similar the PS4 and the Xbox One look, at least from afar. If you don’t follow gaming closely — or if you do, but you’re squinting — it’d be easy to get the two mixed up. Both are jet black, with incredibly sharp angles from edge to edge; the PS4 is just a bit more laid back, with a slight lean to its corners when compared to the Xbox One’s VCR-esque boxiness. If the Xbox One is a rectangular cuboid, the PS4 is a parallelepiped.

PS4 specifications - AMD APU faster than Xbox One

At first glance, the specifications of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One appear to be similar but Sony’s console video chip appears to have the advantage in terms of raw power and processing speed.

The Xbox One has a custom-made, eight x86 low-power/low-cost Jaguar core that is combined with a Radeon HD graphics card with 768 stream processors. There’s also 8GB of DDR3 system memory and 32MD of SRAM cache.

PS4 on the other hand uses the Single-chip x86 AMD "Jaguar" processor with eight cores with a Radeon HD graphics card boasting 1152 stream processors. There’s also 8GB GDDR5 memory and h 32MB of SRAM.

Extreme Tech explains the difference between the two set-ups in more detail…

“The PS4, in comparison, has an 8-core Jaguar AMD CPU, with a GPU that’s around the same level as the Radeon 7870 (which is significantly more powerful than the 7790). The PS4 has 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, providing 176GB/s of bandwidth to both the CPU and GPU.

The Xbox One mostly ameliorates this difference with 32MB of high-speed SRAM on the GPU, but it will be a more complex architecture to take advantage of.

In both consoles, the CPU and GPU will be on the same die (an AMD APU). Just as the PS4 has 8GB of high-speed memory that is shared by the CPU and GPU, the Xbox One – by virtue of being based on the same APU heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) — will probably be the same. In short, while there are small hardware differences between the consoles, they will ultimately have very similar performance characteristics. The PS4, with its one, big block of fast RAM, and bigger GPU, probably has the edge.”

The PS4 was revealed in February and will launch later this year. The design of the console is still under-wraps, but the world’s gaming press, including PSU, will be going hands-on with Sony’s new hardware at the E3 expo in June.

PS4 Release Date

The PS4 release date is "Holiday 2013" for the USA. That's the only official detail Sony revealed at the launch in February and it's unclear which other territories it applies to, if any.

However, Sony recently took out a newspaper ad in the UK, clearly advertising  the PS4 release date as '2013'. That tallies with an interview in May with our buddies at CVG , a source inside Sony said that the company is pulling out all the stops to launch worldwide in 2013 and ensure that the PS4 is not trumped by the new Xbox.

Sony also advertised at the Champions League final at Wembley Stadium, London, with 'PS4 - coming 2013' signs.

Officially, Sony has said it wants the PS4 release date in Europe to be as soon as possible but makes no promises on whether the UK and other European countries will get a release date in time for Christmas this year or whether it'll be an uncomfortable wait until sometime in 2014.

Stock issues might be the reason for this, and that's exactly what happened back in 2006/2007 when the PS3 launched. It went on sale in the US and Japan in time for Christmas and Europe and the rest of the world had to wait for March the next year.

But that newspaper ad certainly seems to confirm that we'll be able to get our hands on the PS4 before Christmas in the US and Europe.

What we know for sure is that we'll get our first glimpse of the PS4 at E3. Check out the PS4 teaser video.

Ps4 A new revolution in gaming world.

Complete Control:

                                                                              DUALSHOCK®4 features new innovations to deliver more immersive gaming experiences, including a highly sensitive six-axis sensor as well as a touch pad located on the top of the controller, which offers gamers completely new ways to play and interact with games. The new Share button puts video streaming and sharing a tap away.