PlayStation 5

Description

Although platforms had mostly standardised on PC style hardware architecture the PS5 provides quite significant enhancements over the prior generation.

Finally a departure from the truly ancient Jaguar cores of the prior generation should see a reduction in bottlenecks with the 8-core Zen 2 CPU. The SoC also contains a custom AMD RDNA 2 GPU with some back-ported features enabling some basic offering 4K gaming at up to 120 FPS. A significant jump in storage from SATA hard disk to NVMe SSDs – 825GB onboard and additional m.2 slot available – sees ultra-fast load times and allows game developers to opt for asset streaming approaches previously unavailable. The platform continues to offer an Ultra HD Blu-ray drive enabling 4K Blu-ray playback and supports immersive 3D audio through the Tempest Engine.

Although technically inferior to the Xbox Series X, the PlayStation 5 sold multiple times more units leading to Microsoft’s decline and withdrawal from the gaming market. It is backward compatible with all but a small handful of PlayStation 4 games such as Robinson: The Journey and We Sing. This has resulted in the PS4 Pro being made effectively redundant, with no benefit to retaining it over the PS5 which has substantial quality of life updates and is generally much more performant.