Paying for PlayStation Plus is not necessary to access PlayStation 4's recording and sharing functionality, IGN reports, leaving gamers wondering if Microsoft's Xbox Live Gold, which requires users to subscribe, will fare out well.

Following earlier news that Xbox One's DVR feature requires users to subscribe to Xbox Live Gold, fans took to Twitter to ask Sony if this would be the case on PlayStation 4, to which president of SCE's worldwide studios Shuhei Yoshida said, definitively, "no" repeatedly, IGN writes.

But free streaming and recording capabilities aren't the only thing gamers monitoring the next-generation battle between Sony and Microsoft are keeping an eye out for.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced the Xbox One's GPU will receive a bump in clock speed from 800MHz to 853MHz.

But while the GPU clock speed upgrade is certainly better than nothing, it only accounts for around a 6 per cent increase, still leaving the PlayStation 4's graphical power far ahead of the Xbox One, ITProPortal reports.

And Sony may still have the advantage in the battle over next-generation console specs as it announced it would release a hardware bundle that includes the Playstation Vita, its respective handheld gaming device.

The bundle will be released at the end of the year.