The PS5 specs were officially revealed by Sony yesterday in a presentation by its lead system architect, Mark Cerny.
The presentation was long – almost an hour, in fact – and full of technical jargon aimed squarely at developers, so it wasn’t quite the glossy reveal we were all hoping for. However, we now know what the PS5 is capable of, and it’s an impressive bit of kit.
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The PS5 will feature a bespoke AMD Zen 2 CPU at 3.5GHz and an AMD RDNA 2 GPU. It’ll also have 16GB of RAM and a huge 825GB SSD that, along with the solid-state drive in the Xbox Series X, will revolutionise gaming.
We know the PS5's most powerful weapon will be its solid-state drive, which will allow the PS5 to load information practically one hundred times faster than the PS4.
Instead of “wait[ing] for the game to boot, wait for the game to load, and wait for the game to reload after you die”, Cerny said PS5 games will boot in a second, with no load screens. Fast travel will become “blink and you miss it” events that developers will actually have to slow down to convey a sense of movement.
Mark Cerny delivering the PS5 presentation
Graphically, it’s got 10.28 teraflops of graphical power and 36 compute units clocked at 2.23GHz (also variable frequency). This is actually lower than the Xbox Series X, which will perform at over 12 Teraflops, but power isn’t everything. The PS5 willI pack next-generation ray-tracing capabilities, able to accurately render reflections, shadow, light and more to create depth in the picture. The PS5 will also support up to 8K capabilities.
A new kind of “spacial 3D audio” will change how you hear games, especially with high-end headphones. Cerny offered the sound of raindrops splashing all around you to “feel like you’re really in the Matrix”. Combined with the depth and realistic images, the PS5 will represent a move towards incredibly immersive gaming like never before.
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The PS5 has confirmed to be backwards compatible, but not for all games due to the PS5’s advanced architecture, and the fact it’s not incorporated PS4 tech into the machine. Cerny confirmed “almost all” of the top 100 PS4 games of all time will be playable, so most of your collection of PS4 games will be safe.
No game information or images of the console were released, but now all big events and gatherings are called off for the foreseeable future, expect future streams to present a glossier reveal in the coming weeks and months.
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