Sony has finally revealed the specifications and hardware details for the PlayStation 5, its next-generation home console that’s planned for release this holiday season.
PlayStation system architect Mark Cerny is discussing the PS5 hardware as we speak, but during the stream, Digital Foundry published a feature revealing the system’s specs. Its CPU features 8 Zen 2 cores, and its GPU–using custom RDNA 2 architecture–offers 10.28 TFLOPs of power. It comes with 16 GB of memory and an 825 GB SSD, and it allows for storage to be expanded with an NVMe SSD slot. In other words, you don’t need a proprietary drive from Sony to increase your storage, but there are specific requirements that a drive will need to meet. As a result, you shouldn’t go buying an SSD for your PS5 just yet. Additionally, Cerny revealed you’ll be able to use an external drive to play PS4 games and to store PS5 games, but like with Series X, you’ll need to move those PS5 games to an appropriate SSD before they can be played.
Cerny noted during his chat that TFLOPs alone aren’t the ultimate measure of performance; you can’t simply compare compute units or FLOPs from PS4 to those of PS5, for instance. While that TFLOPs figure is lower than that of the Xbox Series X, Digital Foundry states, “Sony’s pitch is essentially this: a smaller GPU can be a more nimble, more agile GPU, the inference being that PS5’s graphics core should be able to deliver performance higher than you may expect from a TFLOPs number that doesn’t accurately encompass the capabilities of all parts of the GPU.”
One of the biggest technical updates in the PS5 was already announced last year: a switch to SSD storage for the console’s main hard drive, which Sony says will result in dramatically faster load times. A previous demo showed Spider-Man loading levels in less than a second on the PS5, compared to the roughly eight seconds it took on a PS4.
Cerny shared many new details on the PS5’s system architecture, and he spoke about how Sony plans to push the future of games with this new hardware. One part of this is the PS5’s new SSD, which speeds up loading times and offers a number of other benefits to developers.
Sony has already announced a fair amount of technical details about the PlayStation 5 over the past few months in a trickle of smaller announcements. The company is already promising that the new hardware will add support for both 8K gaming as well as 4K gaming at 120Hz. There’s also a plan to add “3D audio” for more immersive sound, an optional low power consumption mode to save energy, and backwards compatibility with PS4 titles.
