The evolution of the PlayStation

Mohamed Abdul Karim Jabri

Through the last two decades, the technology has evolved in an astonishing way. Each six to seven years a new improved console appears on the market. Graphics, CPUs, and new designs keeps on developing and improving. And for all these years the big tech company Sony always come in first place with their best product the PlayStation.

\"The first PlayStation console was released in 1994. It was a revolutionary console that sold over 100 million units just under a decade. It was at 299$ when it first got launch, it was at a very reasonable price for the first 3D/ 2D games in the world. It had some very interesting new concept games like Crash Bandicoot and Final fantasy. In the early 2000s, Sony introduced the brand-new PlayStation 2, the first multiplayer platform with a 64-bit and an ability to play online with different counties. Additionally, the PS2 won the award of the best celling home console (155 million copy sold) and destroyed the other gaming companies like Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo DS because of the backup capability where you can play PS1 games on it. This console was so powerful and had a new improved slim design that is smaller, thinner, quieter, and included a built-in Ethernet port to enjoy the online experience. The seventh-generation console was the PlayStation 3 where Sony introduced for the first time Blue Ray disc player and a hard drive with either a 20 GB or 60 GB, but over the years its capacity increased in increments available up to 500 GB. The PS3 was also very successful (80 million console sold) that the company decided to improve it with the PS3 slim version :33% smaller, 36% lighter, and consumes 34% to 45% less power than previous models. After 7 years the PS4 was hurled with the x86 architecture and a big improvement of the hardware, an upgraded GPU with 4.2 teraflops of processing power, and higher CPU clock. It is designed primarily to enable selected games to be playable at 4K resolution, and improved quality for PlayStation VR. Finally, the PS5 was realized in November 2020 The console is slated to use an 8-core, 16-thread CPU based on AMD's Zen 2 microarchitecture, manufactured on the 7 nanometer process node. The graphics processor is a custom variant of AMD's Navi family using the RDNA microarchitecture, which includes support for hardware acceleration of ray-tracing rendering, enabling real-time ray-traced graphics. The new console ships with a custom SSD storage, fast loading times and larger bandwidth to make games more immersive, as well as to support the required content streaming from disc for 8K resolution. The system's new controller, the DualSense has adaptive triggers that can change the resistance to the player as necessary, such as changing the resistance during the action of pulling an arrow back in a bow in-game. The controller also has strong haptic feedback through voice coil actuators, which together with an improved controller speaker is intended to give better in-game feedback. USB-C connectivity, together with a higher rated battery are other improvements to the new controller. The PlayStation 5 is backwards-compatible with most PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR games.\"

In conclusion the consoles have evolved astonishingly in the past tow decades. The storage went from 64-bit to one terabit, the graphics increased to 8K and the design got much better and futuristic. The gaming consoles will keep on getting better each and every year with slimmer, lighter gaming machines. The technology will keep on surprising people like the PlayStation VR and the new DualSense in the controllers. It is amazing how all this new things can happen in such a small time.