A first look at the PS5’s specs
Yesterday saw Sony unveil some highly anticipated technical specs for their upcoming PS5, the successor to (you guessed it) the PS4. While details are still very thin on the ground for the key pieces of information on the PS5 – namely, the price, the release date and what the console looks like – yesterday’s announcement did at least clear a few things up. Here’s what we learned.
PS5 comes with backwards compatibility, but not across the board
While Sony have won this generation of the console wars, one area that Microsoft’s Xbox One has consistently bested the PS4 on is backwards compatibility. In particular, the PS3’s unusual architecture has made getting games from that console running on its successor notoriously difficult. Many fans will have been hoping that this would be a key area Sony would address this time around, and they have – in a way.
Mark Cerny confirmed that Sony’s engineers had confirmed that “almost all” of the PS4’s most popular games would be available to play straight from launch on the PS5. This is promising, because it already means the PS5 is getting off to a better start than the PS4 did. However, if you’re expecting to simply plug in and play all of your PS4 games on your PS5, you may well be disappointed.
PS5 weighs in with almost ten times the teraflops of the PS4
Teraflops have become a bit of a meme in the gaming world, with console makers bandying them about with abandon while many gamers sit scratching their heads about what they mean. In short, they’re how many calculations a processor can make per second. More teraflops = better graphics, is the basic calculation to bear in mind. The PS4 base model comes with 1.84 teraflops, while the PS5 will offer an incredible 10.28 teraflops. That’s a serious step up.
825gb SSD as standard
This console generation may well be remembered in the future as the one where game sizes truly went crazy. It’s now not uncommon for a single big triple A titles to weigh in at more than 100GB of storage. It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to know that a 500GB hard drive, which both the PS4 and Xbox One originally shipped with, was no longer going to cut it.
Both Microsoft and Sony are shifting to SSD drives this generation, which have the advantage of being much faster, meaning we can expect vastly reduced loading times. However, unfortunately SSDs are far more expensive than classic hard drives. As such, this is going to limit how much memory we get with the consoles as standard. Sony announced that the PS5 will come with an 825GB SSD as standard, which will come as a disapointment to some given Sony have shipped PS4s with more than twice that memory (albeit it with a hard drive, not an SSD). It’s a good start, but will still fill up fairly quickly if you’re a big gamer.
Don’t forget to check out all the current best PS4 deals to see if you can grab yourself a bargain while you wait for the PS5.
