Pre-orders for the PS5 may not be necessary. Sony is trying to have so many consoles ready for launch that shortages may be out of the question.

Bloomberg Japan and Nihon Keizai Shimbun (via TechRadar) are reporting from anonymous sources that Sony is ramping up production to meet the high demand for the new hardware, which is expected to be more than originally expected due to the coronavirus lockdown The report states.

No definitive figures are available on how many more PS5s Sony is producing ahead of the launch date. However, it is believed to be between 9 and 10 million units, up from Sony's original plan of 6 million units. It is unclear how these units will be divided between the standard PS5, which comes with a disc drive, and the lower-priced PS5 Digital Edition, which supports downloadable games only. This sizable quantity also raises the question of how easily Sony can get these consoles to retailers.

As TechRadar points out, this is far more than the PS4's six-month sales (7.5 million shipped, 1 million pre-orders); with 10 million consoles on hand, availability issues are unlikely to arise during this period.

It is also possible that Sony has overdone its preparations here in order to squeeze out a final advantage over the Xbox Series X. The new Xbox is rumored to be more powerful and cheaper than the PS5, so the PS5 may prove to be the console to get for users who want the best next-generation console experience without the commitment to exclusive titles. 9]

There is a significant difference in GPU output between the Xbox Series X and PS5 Although there are some differences (12 teraflops for the Xbox and 10.3 teraflops for the PS5), both have similar features such as graphics with support for ray tracing, up to 8K resolution output, and SSD storage for speedy loading. Both will be available around November of this year, just in time for the year-end sales season, but neither Sony nor Microsoft has yet revealed an exact date.