PS5: 10 Ways It Will Change Gaming Forever

So, Microsoft and Sony have unleashed their delicious and meticulous list of specifications onto the world, with fanboys everywhere clenching their sphincters, preparing to launch into a totally futile and fruitless fight about which one is better.

Would you have it any other way?

However my only interest is seeing how these consoles can change the landscape of the games industry, not hearing what Cl0udSeFiroF420 thinks about MastaBluntzZz’s mother (sorry, Gamefaqs).

And though I’m excited for both consoles, this article will take a focus on Sony’s PlayStation 5 (perhaps looking into the Xbox One X a little later).

Though Sony’s approach to showing off their stuff over the past several months has been cryptic and piecemeal, we can at least glean several key pieces of information about their brand new dream beast (which is, thankfully, a lot more of a game-centric powerhouse and a lot less like a heart-eating Minotaur than my personal dream beast).

From subtle-but-effective changes to the iconic controller, to a solid-state drive so rapid it’d make The Flash (drive) look positively sluggish... here's everything you need to know about the PS5.

Raytracing might be a bit of a meme at this point, with the internet posting about raytracing curing cancer and helping estranged couples fall in love, but to underestimate the effect it can have on a game’s atmosphere is folly.

Simply put: Raytracing is a rendering technique which traces rays - or paths - of light as pixels in an image plane. By tracing the path of the light and what that light interacts with, you can simulate far more realistic lighting more akin to what you might find outdoors.

Until now we’ve used a lot of approximations (as well as straight-up trickery) to give the illusion of realistic lighting - everything from volumetric lighting (or, “god rays”) to hand-placing spotlights in a scene to appear like a real-world setting.

Raytracing is important for a number of reasons - not least that it allows for a brand new level of believability in intricately-lit areas, taking care of reflections and ambient lighting, whether your game is in a realistic style or otherwise.

Not to be confused with going onto Yodel and Rotten Tomatoes to challenge others to rapidly writing scathing reviews - that’s “Rate Racing”.

I’ll... I’ll see myself out.