Although we finally know what the official images of the PS5 and the list of specifications To complete the console, this article details everything that Sony announced in mid-March about the technical potential that Sony's new platform will offer. Ready for a review of everything that this PlayStation is going to offer us?
10 teraflops that will talk
Can a console justify its potential with a number? Get ready because this year we are going to hear a lot of wars related to the famous teraflops. The figures will be to blame, and it is that Sony has announced that its PS5 will have a total of 10,2 teraflops of power offered by its AMD RDNA 2 GPU with 36 compute units at 2,23 GHz.
Compared to the competition? Xbox Series X it mounts a GPU with the same architecture, with the difference of having 52 computing units at 1,825 GHz, which manages to offer 12 teraflops. Do you remember the Microsoft ad with the phrase “the most powerful console in the world”?
You will return to the game as soon as you die
With that example, Mark Cerny wanted to describe how fast the experience will be on PS5. For this they have designed a Own 825 GB SDD which promises to reach extremely fast read speeds of no less than 5,5 GB/s, a figure that is especially striking when compared to the 2,4 GB/s that the Xbox Series X moves in RAW.
This storage unit can be expanded using NVMe SSD M.2 disks, but it will have to pass a certification to be used in PS5, so Cerny has recommended that users not buy units until Sony clarifies more about it.
Realistic graphics with ray tracing
Yes, it was to be expected. PS5 will also feature ray tracing technology, which will allow for a more realistic representation of how light and reflections behave on surfaces rendered in the game. This will allow for a much more realistic or much more striking representation in games, and yes, we can say that it has become one of the base features of this generation, since Xbox Series X will also offer it.
Will I be able to play games from previous generations?
For now, PS5 will be compatible with PS4 Pro and PS4 games, since Sony has not gone into detail about the rumored backward compatibility with the first three generations. When PS5 hits stores, 100 most played games in the previous generation they will be automatically backward compatible, however, the rest will have to wait for adjustments and modifications, since PS5 is too fast and the games would work incorrectly.
Audio will be very important
The sound will be one of the key points when it comes to receiving PS5. Sony has developed the chip Storm Engine, which will be able to handle hundreds of different sound sources. Having a wide range of sound sources would be useless if the console fails to project sound properly to the user, and that is where a series of problems come in that are insurmountable for now, such as the shape of the head and ears of each player.
The idea is that in the middle of the game we know how to exactly locate the origin of each sound, regardless of the objects that appear in the scenes or the number of sounds that are played. Tempsest Engine will be able to analyze all of that, but the next challenge comes in getting it out to the user. Some headphones would be the best solution, but it must be taken into account that many users play directly with the television speakers, so in this case the manufacturer would use sound virtualization technology, a technology that is not available in all TVs on the market.
To solve the problem of the shape of the ears, Cerny has commented that an application could be used to take a photo of them and configure a profile preconfigured by the brand that will be selected automatically after analyzing the image in a neural network. It is not officially the solution that they are going to implement, but it has left the idea in the air (remember that Sony already offers something similar with its 360 Reality Audio technology).
Official PS5 Features
After all these details, the official list of the technical characteristics of PS5 remains as follows:
- CPU: AMD Zen 2 8-core 3.5 GHz (variable frequency)
- GPU: RDNA 2 with 10,28 TFLOPs, 36 CUs at 2,23 GHz
- RAM: 16GB GDDR6/256-bit
- Optical drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray
- Internal storage: 825GB proprietary SSD hard drive
- External storage: NVMe SSD slot
PS5 or Xbox Series X? Which is more powerful?
If you are asking yourself this question, let me tell you that you are completely wrong. Seen what has been seen, although technically both consoles share the central core of the hardware, each one is guiding its way of seeing the new generation in a completely different way, and that is the best news we could have.
While Xbox offers more raw graphics power at the teraflop level, PS5 seems to focus priority on speed per graphics core. In addition, PS5 has confirmed to have a significantly faster storage option than Xbox Series X, so this could offer a completely different gaming experience in aspects that until now went completely unnoticed, such as that annoying pause in load times.
The future of both consoles looks exciting, so we can't wait to continue seeing more details to continue enjoying the show.