Sony revealed the complete specs of the upcoming PlayStation 5 in a stream earlier this week. And in the stream PS5 lead system architect, Mark Cerny promised that the “top 100” games from PlayStation 4 will be playable at launch on the PS5. This list of the top 100 games has apparently been made by ranking their playtime. Beside the PlayStation 4 the PlayStation 5 does not seem to be backward compatible with the PS3, PS2, and PSOne.
“Running PS4 and PS4 titles at boosted frequencies has also added complexity,” Cerny said. “The boost is truly massive this time around and some game code can’t handle it. Testing has to be done on a title-by-title basis. Results are excellent, though. We recently took a look at the top 100 PlayStation 4 titles as ranked by playtime, and we’re expecting almost all of them to be playable at launch on PlayStation 5.”
Cerny refers to the PlayStation 3 that was launched with backward compatibility for PS2 games. But the feature was later removed. “Once backwards compatibility is in the console, it’s in,” He added. “It’s not as if a cost-down will remove backwards compatibility like it did on PlayStation 3.” He promises that this won’t be the case with the PS5. But for now it seems that PS5 will have is backward compatibility limited to PS4.
Sony PS5: Specifications
The Sony PlayStation 5 will come with a custom eight-core AMD Zen 2 CPU clocked at 3.5GHz and a custom GPU based on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture hardware that goes up to 10.28 teraflops and has 36 compute units clocked at 2.23GHz. Both the CPU and GPU will support variable frequencies. The PS5 is set to have 16GB of GDDR6 RAM and a custom 825GB SSD. Sony promises that the SSD will have super fast load times in games. The PS5 SSD is set to have a bandwidth of 5GB per second while it will have a load time of 2GB in 0.27 seconds.
And SSD is not the only storage option for the upcoming Sony PlayStation 5. It will also have support for USB hard drives, but these are slower hence will be used mostly for backward-compatible PS4 games. It will have a 4K Blu-ray drive which means that it will support disks as well. But the games from those disks will still require storage and installation space on the SSD. Sony is using the NVMe SSD standard which means that these are expandable in the future. But any expansion will have to meet the Sony standard of at least 5.5GB/s.
Sony PlayStation 5 the company has promised will add support for both 8K gaming as well as 4K gaming at 120Hz. Sony also plans to add a ‘3D audio’ support which it revealed earlier. This feature will provide immersive audio for players when playing games that require precision audio. It will also come with an optional low power mode which will save energy. Sony still hasn’t provided a concrete date of when we can see the PS5 launch, but the Holiday 2020 still stands.
