Sony confirms specs of PlayStation 5: Here's everything you need to know

Earlier this week, Microsoft unveiled the Xbox Series X in all its glory. Now, Microsoft’s biggest console rival has announced details of the Sony PlayStation 5. Sony’s revealed the specifications and hardware of the console that is arriving during this December holiday season.

Sony is using a custom eight-core AMD Zen 2 CPU that is clocked at 3.5GHz. The PlayStation 5 will also have a custom AMD GPU based on RDNA 2 architecture, promising 10.28 teraflops and 36 compute units clocked at 2.23GHz. The PS5 also gets 16GB of DDR6 RAM, similar to that on the Xbox Series X. The Sony PlayStation 5 will also have full support for real-time ray tracing.

Sony promises super-faster load times in games through a custom 825GB SSD. With the PS4, some game data was stored in the RAM instead of getting it from the hard drive to access the data quickly. However, the company claims that the PS5’s SSD is almost as fast as the RAM. This will allow game developers to retrieve game data from the SSD itself, freeing up more RAM.

The company will also be offering another storage bay to add an extra SSD card, but drivers need to be capable of similar speeds as Sony’s custom 825GB SSD. The management said that it will publish a list of compatible SSDs after the launch of the PS5. In comparison to a PlayStation 4, which can load 50-100MB a second, the PS5’s SSD drive does 5GB per second.

The Sony PS5 won’t just be limited to a solid-state drive; it will also have support for USB hard drives. But those slower storage drives will mostly be designed for backwards-compatible PS4 titles. The PlayStation 5 will also feature a 4K Blu-ray drive to support discs, but the games will require installation onto the SSD before playing them.

During the announcement, Sony also confirmed that the PS5 would feature hardware-accelerated 3D audio with the use of Tempest 3D Audio Engine, a specialised co-processor. The sound on the PS5 will be the 'gold standard' for console audio on headphones, while Sony is also tweaking it for use on TV speakers or soundbars to create a virtual surround sound experience.

AMD has collaborated with Sony to incorporate PS4 logic and features into the custom AMD Zen 2 chip. PlayStation hardware lead Mark Cerny said they tested the top 100 PlayStation 4 titles on the PS5 and almost all will be playable at launch.

Some of the other features already promised on the PlayStation 5 include support for 8K gaming and 4K gaming up to 120Hz. Unlike its green rival, Sony didn’t reveal the design of the next PlayStation.