Gaming

Sony finally reveals the PlayStation 5's glorious specs

New controllers, ray tracing, 3D audio, 8K, and a groundbreaking SSD.

Joe Brady/Getty Images Sport/Getty Images
Ryan Houlihan

After a long, painful wait, Sony Interactive Entertainment finally decided to reveal its plans for the PlayStation 5 today via a live stream "deep dive" by lead system architect Mark Cerny. The new console is planned to launch this holiday season to compete with Microsoft's latest Xbox Series X. Today, the company is focusing on the system's hardware specs rather than a slew of game announcements.

Tune in below at 9a.m. PT/12 p.m. ET:

Here are all the nitty gritty spec details you could need:

  • The PS5 CPU will be based on AMD's Ryzen and feature 8x cores at 3.5GHz (variable frequency) and its 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. The GPU will be a customized version of the AMD RDNA 2 featuring 36 CUs capped at 2.23GHz (variable frequency) which will support ray tracing on the hardware level.
  • This means the PS5 will be effectively delivering 10.28 teraflops at its peak performance.
  • The PS5 will support 8K, though we're not sure in what capacity, and 4K UHD Blu-ray content.
  • The console will have 16GB GDDR6/256-bit RAM with a memory bandwidth of 448GB/s.
  • The SSD will feature a custom 825GB SSD using the new PCIe 4.0 connection which will slash load times. Cerny has previously noted that Marvel's Spider-Man saw a load time drop from 15 seconds to 0.8 seconds thanks to this change alone.
  • There are two dedicated I/O coprocessors, with a throughput of 5.5GB/s raw and 8-9GB/s compressed.
  • The system will also feature a NVMe SSD slot for expandable storage, though USB HDD will still be supported.
  • It'll feature Tempest 3D audio, which Mark Cerny has previously said would be "dramatically different."
  • It's rumored to come with PSVR support baked in.
Sony

As for what we know about the games themselves:

  • The PS5 won't be digital only — don't worry, you'll still be able to buy physical games!
  • The PS5 will be backwards compatible with all PS4 games and, at first, most games will be released on both platforms simultaneously.
  • It's rumored that it'll support all (or nearly all) home console PlayStation games through emulation, though it's unknown if this is software or hardware enabled.
Sony