As expected, the in-game presentation of Sony for the PlayStation 5 also revealed the technical specifications of the console. Sony puts all the cards on the table in a blog post and via an almost-hour-long live stream on YouTube.
The PlayStation 5 is powered by an “AMD Ryzen Zen 2” CPU, having eight cores each clocked at up to 3.5 GHz. The computing unit is supported by an RDNA 2-based GPU that promises 10.3 teraflops at a variable frequency up to 2.23 GHz and fitted with 36 CUs (compute units). PlayStation 5 gets a custom SSD with 825 GB of storage – so far, at least 1 TB was assumed.
The Game consoles offer 16 GB RAM (GDDR6). Like Microsoft, Sony also promises dramatically reduced loading times compared to the previous model. Other similarities include a Blu-ray drive, support for external USB hard drives, ray tracing support, and 4K gaming at up to 120 fps.
During the presentation, Hardware architect Mark Cerny named the performance values of the built-in SSD. And that can be seen in a direct comparison: While the PlayStation 4 takes about 20 seconds to load a data volume of 1 gigabyte (GB), the successor creates 2 GB within 0.27 seconds – a remarkable value. Among other things, this means that, according to Cerny, loading times will practically no longer exist in the future – and long booting when starting the PS5 is also a thing of the past!
Sony has not yet announced any separately available external SSDs, such as Microsoft, will offer for memory expansion. However, you will be able to install NVMe SSDs intended for PCs in the PS5 if they are fast enough (at least 5.5GB/s). Sony will publish the relevant information until the console starts.
The PS5 should also be able to display games in 8K, presumably upscaled. The PlayStation 5 will also be backward compatible – but in what form exactly remains to open.
