PS5 Rumors 2020: Release Date, Specs, Games And More Ps5 Specification
The PS5 is only months away, and official news and rumors about Sony’s hotly anticipated next-generation console continue to fly fast by the day. The PlayStation 5 will launch in Holiday 2020, boasting serious specs including 8-core processors that allow for ray tracing and zippy SSDs that all but eliminate load times.
Sony recently took the wraps off of a ton of key PS5 specs, including its blazing fast SSD, mega powerful RDNA-based graphics card and immersive 3D audio engine. We also recently got our first official look at the system’s radical new DualSense controller, which is a significant departure from the DualShock controller we’re used to.
Here’s everything we know so far about the PS5, including its release date, confirmed specs, expected games and more.
PS5 specs
(Image credit: Sony)
- CPU: 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz
- GPU: 10.28 TFLOPs, 36 CUs at 2.23GHz, RDNA 2 architecture
- RAM: 16GB GDDR6
- Storage: Custom 825GB SSD
- Expandable storage: NVMe SSD slot
- Optical drive: 4K Blu-ray drive
During his talk, Cerny hit on three main pillars of the PS5’s development: “Listening to developers,” “Balancing evolution and revolution” and “Finding new dreams.” Practically speaking, these three categories speak to the PS5’s SSD configuration, backwards compatibility and 3D audio capabilities. We also learned about the system’s CPU, GPU and RAM structure, although that information is potentially of more use to developers than everyday consumers at the moment.
(Image credit: Sony)
Listening to developers
While the PS5 will be able to produce better graphics than the PS4, the more pressing concern is load times. Cerny explained that the PS4’s internal hard drive, at best, can load about 1 GB of data in 7 seconds — and this figure usually balloons to 20 seconds, once you take seek times into account.The solution, according to Cerny, was to take advantage of solid state drives (SSDs), which were prohibitively costly when the PS4 first came out, but now quite common. Since SSDs require no seek time, and retrieve information much faster, Cerny said that the PS5 targets a load rate of 5.5 GB/s. In theory, that’s almost 10 times faster than the PS4. Cerny imagines that developers might have to artificially increase wait times for loading screens, respawns and fast travel, if only to stop things from happening too fast for the player.
(It’s worth noting that in practice, load times are dependent on more than simply how fast a console can parse data, but if the PS5 can halve load times rather than increasing them tenfold, that will still have a big impact on how players go through games.)
To be cost-effective, however, Cerny said that the PS5’s default hard drive will be 825 GB. (Whether he means 825 GB usable space or total space, he didn’t elaborate.) Players who want more storage space will be able to replace the SSD with third party models, but they won’t be able to do so right away.
Last year, for example, even the most powerful SSDs on the market could only transfer data at a rate of 3.0 GB/s. Cerny believes that by the end of this year, they’ll be up to a rate of 7.0 GB/s. Sony will still have to test a variety of drives for both functionality and physical fit, to ensure compatibility. After all, if the SSDs can’t hit the 5.5 GB/s transfer rate, high-end games could be nearly unplayable.
As such, Cerny believes that SSD swapping will have to wait until somewhat after the PS5’s launch. He cautioned potential buyers to hold off on purchasing additional SSDs for now. (External hard drives are fine, if you want to use them to store PS4 games.)
(Image credit: Sony)
Balancing evolution and revolution
Cerny thought that for the PS5 launch, it was important to balance the concepts of evolution — backwards compatibility and familiarity for developers — and revolution — new features and higher efficiency.Cerny’s lecture on “revolution” was one of the most technically complex of his talk, focusing on the PS5’s custom RDNA2 AMD GPU, and the physical construction of the PS5’s CPU. The short version is that the control unit (CU) on the PS5 is 62% larger than the PS4’s, largely due to the amount of transistors present. This means the PS5’s CPU will be able to route more processes, more efficiently.
The GPU will also make use of both ray tracing and primitive shaders, which will affect both power consumption and heat management. Unlike the PS4, on which power consumption can variously tremendously from game to game, the PS5 will try to standardize power consumption for each game and make resources available as needed. This should prevent overheating, as well as excessive fan noise.
Potentially more interesting to the everyday consumer was the information on how PS5’s backwards compatibility would work. Unlike the PS3, which essentially incorporated a PS2’s guts into early models, the PS5 will run older games via regularized software algorithms. In theory, this means that almost every PS4 game will be compatible with the PS5 right from the get-go.
In practice, that seems to be the way things are working out, too. Cerny explained that the developers have tested the PS5 with the top 100 PS4 games (based on playtime), and discovered that most of them work beautifully. At launch, most of those 100 games will be playable. However, Cerny didn’t detail which games would get left out. He also didn’t elaborate on whether every PS4 game would be compatible until proven otherwise, or whether Sony would manage which games get the backwards compatibility treatment first.
One bright spot, at least, is that the PS5 will offer both PS4 Pro and regular PS4 compatibility modes, so games that were optimized for the PS4 Pro will not get left behind.
(Image credit: Sony)
Finding new dreams
One of the most exciting —but also most technically demanding — aspects of the PS5 is its emphasis on 3D audio. Cerny pointed out that a game screen refreshes between 60 and 120 times per second, but audio calculations have to happen up to 200 times per second. Audio is a vital part of any game experience and developers have not always given it the due it deserves.Some PC headsets already feature 3D audio, but eventually, Cerny wants the PS5 to deliver 3D audio, regardless of platform: TV speakers, headset or soundbar. The key to 3D audio lies in Head Related Transfer Function, or HRTF.
Briefly, everyone’s ears are shaped somewhat differently, and that affects how our brains process sound. HRTF maps out an individual’s hearing based on a sound’s frequency, direction and volume.
While it’s not possible for the PS5 to account for every single individual’s HRTF (at least not at launch), Sony mapped out five different standardized HRTF profiles, and users will be able to select the one that best matches their preferences. If the HRTF is close to a user’s ear structure, he or she will hear sounds as though they were happening in real life, all around them, rather than coming from a speaker.
This functionality will be available only on headsets at first, but Cerny wants to expand it tremendously over the next few years. He envisions a future in which a user could send a picture of his or her ears and a neural net could analyze them — or one in which every user starts the PS5 experience by playing an audio game to map out an exact HRTF profile. This is a feature that will keep evolving as the PS5 does.
As far as release date and games, we don’t have any more information than we did before. But this deep dive was a promising start, and could mean a substantially better moment-to-moment experience than the PS4 offers.
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