Sony Finally Reveals Upcoming PlayStation 5 Console Specs

• Sony unveiled the PS5 specs, and this next-gen console is leaving PS4 far behind.
• The upcoming gaming system comes with ray-tracing, SSD, and an advanced binaural sound system.
• Players should expect the console to arrive by the end of 2020, along with the Xbox Series X.

Mark Cerny, the lead system architect of the Sony PlayStation 5 console, has unveiled the technical specifications of the next-gen device in a streamed live presentation. The highlights of the presentation are a built-in SSD drive for super-fast loading times, a highly advanced audio system that makes the most out of in-game sounds, adaptive CPU clock speeds for energy saving, and full ray tracing support. The aspects not revealed were the design, the retail price, and the exact release date (although this will certainly be around Christmas).

The CPU will be an eight-core AMD Zen 2 capped at 3.5GHz, while the GPU will be based on AMD’s RDNA 2. This unit comprises of 36 computing units running at 2.23GHz, topping at 10.3 teraflops. Ray-tracing will be supported, although there’s ambiguity around how much of it we’ll be getting. Moreover, 4K gaming with ray-tracing is non-negotiable, but it could be either at 60 or 30 frames per second. As for the memory dedicated to the GPU, it’s going to be of the GDDR6 type, having 16 GB of size, and offering 448 GB/s of bandwidth.

The M2 SSD inside the PS5 will work on a proprietary 5.5GB/sec transfer rate specification, and it’s going to offer a comfortable size of 825 GB. Sony says the new SSD unit is a hundred times faster than the HDD that was used in the PS4, having instantaneous seeking times and being able to load 2GB-files in 0.27 seconds. It means that players shouldn’t have much time to feast upon the loading screen artwork, as the progress bars will fill quickly. Moreover, the PS5 will give game developers the option to pre-load game assets on the RAM for even quicker transitioning, so the loading buffers between checkpoints and chapters will be a thing of the past too.

Finally, Cerny spoke proudly of the PS5’s new 3D audio system called “Tempest 3D Audio Tech.” It will be able to adjust to the specific HRTF (head-related transfer function) of the user, and it will work regardless of the available speaker system. Each person listens to sounds a bit differently due to the anatomy of their ear canal, and Sony has created a surround sound system that will reproduce truthful directional audio that is perceived by the player in a natural way. Of course, the users will have to go through a setting/calibration step, to figure out their very own “sweet spot.”