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Finally, some actual details about the PlayStation 5

After many months of silence Sony has finally graced us with the specs of the hardware that will be inside the PlayStation 5 when it launches near the end of 2020.

This comes off of the back of a presentation by Mark Cerny, the lead system architect for the new console.

If you’ve got an hour to spare and you like incredibly detailed tech talk, you can watch his full presentation on YouTube right here.

If you’re just interested in the actual list of specs, here they are:

CPU x86-64-AMD Ryzen™ “Zen 2”
8 Cores / 16 Threads
Variable frequency, up to 3.5 GHz
GPU AMD Radeon™ RDNA 2-based graphics engine
Ray Tracing Acceleration
Variable frequency, up to 2.23 GHz (10.3 TFLOPS)
System Memory GDDR6 16GB
448GB/s Bandwidth
SSD 825GB
5.5GB/s Read Bandwidth (Raw)
PS5 Game Disc Ultra HD Blu-ray™, up to 100GB/disc
Video Out Support of 4K 120Hz TVs, 8K TVs, VRR (specified by HDMI ver.2.1)
Audio “Tempest” 3D AudioTech

While this list doesn’t tell us everything and is a bit gimped by some context provided by Cerny in his presentation, it’s refreshing to finally have some hard details about Sony’s new console.

“… the ultra-high-speed SSD, integrated custom I/O system, custom AMD GPU with ray tracing, and highly immersive 3D audio. With these capabilities, PS5 will allow developers to maximize their creativity, building expansive worlds and new play experiences in the games they design,” Writes Hideaki Nishino, senior vice President, platform planning & management on the official PlayStation Blog.

All this extra horsepower points to the fact that the next generation of games will not only be bigger and more detailed, but will also feature faster load times and higher graphics fidelity combined with great framerates.

All of this may sound familiar, as Microsoft similarly released a full spec list for its Xbox Series X. While you can do some comparisons between the two (this table has been doing the rounds), we really wouldn’t put too much stock into such “on paper” things until the consoles are out in the wild. Numbers in tables can only go so far until real benchmarks and performance numbers can be had, and then there’s the matter of price.

Prices for both the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X are a mystery right now, with only rumours about their respective RRPs floating around right now. Any performance changes between the two could be quashed by how that performance relates to price, so again we need to sit and wait for more details.

Finally it’s worth mentioning that the PlayStation 5, like the Xbox Series X, will have a degree of backwards compatibility.

“Lastly, we’re excited to confirm that the backwards compatibility features are working well. We recently took a look at the top 100 PS4 titles as ranked by play time, and we’re expecting almost all of them to be playable at launch on PS5. With more than 4000 games published on PS4, we will continue the testing process and expand backwards compatibility coverage over time,” adds Nishino.

While nice to know, it’s far from the Microsoft approach where the Series X will support all software and hardware released for the previous generation Xbox One.

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