The Game Developers Conference might have been postponed due to the coronavirus, but Sony still gave its developer keynote which had been planned for the event. This was done yesterday via a livestream on the official PlayStation blog and it revealed some technical details about the Sony PlayStation 5.
The presentation was made by Mark Cerny, one of the designers of the PlayStation 5, and it covered a deep dive on the next-gen console, revealing everything but what it looks like (or any of its games for that matter) and how much it would cost. Alongside the presentation, specs for the console were also revealed in an in-depth analysis done by Digital Foundry. Below is a table replicated from that analysis that shows how the PS5 compares with the PS4.
| PlayStation 5 | PlayStation 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz with SMT (variable frequency) | 8x Jaguar Cores at 1.6GHz |
| GPU | 10.28 TFLOPs, 36 CUs at 2.23GHz (variable frequency) | 1.84 TFLOPs, 18 CUs at 800MHz |
| GPU Architecture | Custom RDNA 2 | Custom GCN |
| Memory / Interface | 16GB GDDR6/256-bit | 8GB GDDR5/256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 448GB/s | 176GB/s |
| Internal Storage | Custom 825GB SSD | 500GB HDD |
| IO Throughput | 5.5GB/s (Raw), Typical 8-9GB/s (Compressed) | Approx 50-100MB/s (dependent on data location on HDD) |
| Expandable Storage | NVMe SSD Slot | Replaceable internal HDD |
| External Storage | USB HDD Support | USB HDD Support |
| Optical Drive | 4K UHD Blu-ray Drive | Blu-ray Drive |
One of the biggest selling points for the new console is the inclusion of a custom 825GB SSD, which promises to greatly reduce load times, a major pain point with all current-gen consoles. In terms of GPU power, the PS5 boasts 10.28 teraflops, which is almost 10 times the power of the base PS4, although still short of the Xbox Series X’s 12 teraflops.
You can watch the full presentation below, but be warned that it does go into a lot of technical details:
What did you think about the PS5 reveal presentation? Were you disappointed we didn’t actually get to see the PS5 or any games running on the hardware? Let us know in the comments section below.