PlayStation 5 Specifications Revealed

Mark Cerny has just revealed the technical data for the upcoming PlayStation 5, during the hour long presentation the Lead System Architect of the console revealed Sony’s approach at the challenge of designing a next generation console that is, both revolutionary and developers friendly. The console will feature a custom 8 Cores/16 threads AMD Ryzen CPU, GDDR6 16GB memory and an AMD Radeon RDNA 2-based GPU capable of delivering 10.3 teraflops.

Cerny opened the presentation talking about the balance between evolution and revolution, the PlayStation 5 is designed to be easy for game developers, the required time for developers to learn the new programming model is under a month. A significant improvement from the 1-2 months required for the PS4 architecture.

The PlayStation 5’s SSD specifications where revealed, 5 GB/s will be offered, the seek time it’s instantaneously, load times are fast as expected. Cerny explains that the SSD changes the way developers create a game. Sony has targeted a 5GB/s SSD in order to potentially eliminate loading screens, but the main objective was to allow texture streaming. The PS5 will be able to stream texture in a fraction of a second.

An example of how texture streaming was given, as a player is turning around the camera in a game, the console can load the game’s texture on demand, a half second turn can load up to 4GB of compressed data, Cerny claims “that sounds about right for next gen”.

According to Sony, “The SSD it’s very close to being like more RAM”, most of RAM will be working on the game’s behalf. Large pieces of data can be directly loaded from the SSD, this allows developers to have more RAM available for their needs. The PlayStation 5 will feature 16 GB GDDR6 RAM.

PlayStation 5’s SSD will potentially boot the game in a few seconds, eliminate loading screens, give developers more freedom, pack more data on the disk and SSD and eliminate long patch installations.

Cerny confirmed that, similar to the Xbox Series X, the PlayStation 5 will be supporting “certain” M.2 SSDs to increase the 825 GB of storage. The console will have a special bay, this will allow users to install an internal drive, unlike Xbox, players won’t have to buy a proprietary SSD to expand the storage of the system.

External drives will also benefit from decompression and the I/O Co-processors, making them useful for running games directly from the removable drive. Owners can also use a standard SSD, or HDD for PS4 games. Owners who want to extend the storage size of the console will have to look for a 5.5GB/s capable M.2 SSD.

Backwards compatibility is confirmed, according to Cerny, Sony targeted the top 100 games of the PS4 library, he claims that most of them are already working for the PS5.

PS5 features a Custom RDNA 2 AMD GPU, the console will take full advantage of the malleable nature of the architecture, Sony has managed to meet their needs for the next gen console.

The PlayStation 5 GPU will deliver 10.28 TFLOPs, 36 CUs at 2.23GHz (variable frequency), Cerny advises that TFLOPs is not an accurate measure on how capable the console will be.

Sony did not revealed the DualShock 5 or the final design of the console, however he suggest that the console will have a revolutionary design thanks to it’s cooling solution.

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