PlayStation 4 Arrival Imminent? What We Know So Far

Sony's PlayStation series is one of the popular gaming consoles on the planet at the moment apart from Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo.

With the PS3 serving the current generation, fans believe that a new avatar of PS - PlayStation 4 - will integrate brand new features once it hits the market with a more powerful processor, a boat-load of RAM and a rich GPU. However, nothing can be said for certain at the moment.

Nonetheless, here's everything we know about the heavily rumored PlayStation 4.

3D Integration: Sony is heavily rumored to implement the 3D technology into the upcoming Playstation 4 after the company did the same thing with almost every area they cover in the market.

3D has also become an important aspect of the PS3, and Sony, reportedly, is working hard to promote it. Now the PS4 is also said to incorporate 3D as a feature that all games on the system have to support from the start.

However, some believe that 3D will be implemented in PS4 as an optional choice (with or without glasses) which is a much more realistic thought as not everybody is comfortable with the technology.

Blu-ray: Blu-ray is one of the coolest technologies around at the moment and it has, in time, almost completely battered the DVD format to oblivion, and has also proved to be a more convenient solution for the gaming industry.

The Blu-ray technology has not only managed to make the games HD sharper but can also fit into a single disc, unlike the Xbox 360, where it needs a number of discs to store certain games. Sony is expected to keep Blu-Ray as an optical format for the PS4.

Processor: Previously it was reported that the PlayStation 3 has a processor (or Cell) which is a hundred times powerful as the Xbox 360′s processor. But it has also been said that the PS3 doesn't fully utilize its powers. Here the PS3 can be compared to the previous Nintendo 64 in terms of the GPU which is quite poor. Also the RAM and the DMA (Direct Memory Access) are quite poor and insufficient and hence cannot support the all powerful Cell.

This creates a situation where it is nearly impossible for developers such as Valve and BioWare to make full use of the power processing chip. Moreover, if they try to utilize the processor's powers in full, they would be overloading the RAM and the GPU that would make the game pretty unstable and crash-prone.

Hence most of the current games are first developed for the Xbox 360 and later ported over to the PS3, maybe sometimes with a bit of modifications. Now it is expected that the upcoming PS4 will solve this issue of the processing unit that will make life a bit easier for the developers and will be able to generate maximum output for the gamers.

PS Universal Compatibility: Currently except a few PS models, the PS3 fails to play PS2 games though it does manage to play the first PS games which is actually quite strange for gamers. However, tech enthusiasts widely believe that the PS4 will have a PS universal compatibility that will let you play all the PS models games with PSP games available for download on PSN which can be a pretty cool factor.

PlayStation 4

Controller: Fans all over believe that it's high time Sony introduced a new set of controllers for their popular gaming console, at least ones which look a bit different from its predecessors. The only difference the controller of a PS3 has with the first PS is the color and, probably, wires (and also a single button added to the PS3 controller).

Sony here may have thought that keeping the same controller would be beneficial for the gamers who could get confused with the new set of controllers and the buttons on it, but it can be also very tiring for the gamer to be stuck with a same controller when they had expected something different for the previous ones. Sony's rivals in this department - Microsoft (Xbox) and Nintendo - always come up with something different every generation. However, fans are now expecting something futuristic with the arrival of the PS4.

PlayStation Network: Though the PlayStation Network is simply a ground-breaking concept for the PS3 gamers, it still has a long way to go when compared to Xbox Live from Microsoft, its biggest rival. Some may argue that PSN Plus, which is a paid service of the PSN, offers more content and is also close to match Xbox Live, but still there is a void left when Xbox Live and PSN are thoroughly compared.

However, with the possibility of a PS4 looming on the horizon, the tech enthusiasts have concluded that Sony, this time, will offer exclusive demos and downloadable games. These are small things that can mean a lot to a gamer, and can also spell profit for the company.

(Information from Gamingbolt.com)