PlayStation 5 Specs Revealed

I did it, I have successfully sat through a dry 52 minute presentation all on the PlayStation 5’s tech. Not only was I bored to tears, but a lot of the deeper information went straight over my head. However I was still interested to see how the system was built and what we as gamers would be getting later this year.

The PlayStation 5 has a fair amount of new bells and whistles, from a 4K Blu-ray drive to a rather confusing backwards compatibility feature. It is clear that Sony wanted to try and blow consumers out of the water, but what really gets me (and apparently developers as wel)l really excited is something that was the number one developer request; a solid state drive or SSD for short.

Adding an SSD is an extremely exciting prospect for a few reasons. Firstly, creators will not only be able to cut load times down to very short speeds, but they will also be able to create larger open worlds and rely less on development shortcuts to help hide loading areas. Secondly the SSD will help boot time to the games themselves, making them nearly instant so you can hop back in the action right after the console boots up.

Now I am definitely no tech expert, but I do enjoy trying to learn as much about the industry as I can. Watching how Mark Cerny speaks about the minute details was just so intriguing, even if teraflops and GPUs confuse me. Now for the rest of the specs I can’t go into great detail on what everything does, but I have a list of what new gadgets the PlayStation 5 will have at its disposal.

CPU: AMD Zen 2-based CPU with 8 cores at 3.5GHz (variable frequency)
GPU: 10.28 TFLOPs, 36 CUs at 2.23GHz (variable frequency)
GPU architecture: Custom RDNA 2
Memory interface: 16GB GDDR6 / 256-bit
Memory bandwidth: 448GB/s
Internal storage: Custom 825GB SSD
IO throughput: 5.5GB/s (raw), typical 8-9GB/s (compressed)
Expandable storage: NVMe SSD slot
External storage: USB HDD support (PS4 games only)
Optical drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray drive
Thank you to techradar for this full list

The games will make full use of ray tracing, and developers have cut down on the learning curve of development to under a month according to Mark Cerny. Now this is pretty impressive as the PlayStation 3 was notoriously hard to develop for, which made games like Mass Effect and Skyrim borderline unplayable in some parts.

One feature I am particularly excited over is the 3D audio. 3D audio makes it so that the sound effect audio is able to bounce from multiple points in the room so you will be able to find enemies just by their sound. This sounds like a great way to start off a next generation and I am all-in on a new pair of headphones to take full advantage of this new feature.

The PlayStation 5 is making strides in some areas while falling behind the Xbox Series X in some others. I for one am looking forward to what the new generation will bring game wise, but with the features and specs I am all in on the new generation of hardware.