The highly anticipated PlayStation 5 Specifications have arrived and we are excited to share them with you.
These specs came Straight from the mouth of Sony’s Mark Cerny in a live stream you can watch here.
Here are the most pertinent things you need to know.:
PlayStation 5 Specifications:
- AMD Zen 2 CPU clocked at 3.5GHz with variable frequency
- Custom AMD 8-core RDNA 2 GPU with 10.28 teraflops and 36 compute units clocked at 2.23GHz with variable frequency
- 16GB of GDDR6 RAM with 448GB/s bandwidth
- Custom 825GB SSD with 5.5GB/s
- Expandable storage with both USB and internal NVMe drives
The PS5 will have a 4K Blu-Ray drive although games will still need to be installed to the SSD.
As far as power goes the Xbox Series X has more power packing 12 Teraflops as opposed to the PS5’s 10.28 Teraflops.
This means that teraflops, typically a fairly good indicator of performance, simply don’t matter as much when it comes to PS5 vs Xbox Series X. The PS5’s slightly less powerful GPU with fewer compute units may end up being just as powerful as the Xbox Series X’s because each of the PS5’s compute units arerunning at a higher speed and because fewer, faster compute units can be more efficient.
According to Sony, all PS5 consoles process the same workloads with the same performance level in any environment, no matter what the ambient temperature may be. They refer to this as “Boost”. Put simply, the PlayStation 5 is given a set power budget tied to the thermal limits of the cooling assembly. “It’s a completely different paradigm,” says Cerny. “Rather than running at constant frequency and letting the power vary based on the workload, we run at essentially constant power and let the frequency vary based on the workload.”
Sony says that a smaller GPU can be nimbler, more agile GPU, the conclusion 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
The PS5 also has an advantage with its SSD. The SSD offers 5.5GB/s throughput, which means
Games will load almost 100 times faster than on PS4 going from 20 seconds for 1GB of data, to 5.5GB in one second. They have achieved this with a completely custom SSD.
Finally, I will mention that the Tempest 3D Audio solution for the PS5 will be a huge step forward for gaming technology presenting tremendously more realistic sounds on all games and media compared to the PS4.So all in all a vast improvement on the PS4.It seems at this moment that the Sony is trying to make the PS5 the better priced console but only time will tell if Microsoft will allow this when the Xbox Series X is revealed later this year.