The PlayStation 5 (PS5) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Announced in 2019 as the successor to the PlayStation 4, the PS5 was released on November 12, 2020, in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, North America, and South Korea, with worldwide release following a week later. The PS5, along with Microsoft's Xbox Series X and Series S consoles were released in the same month, is part of the ninth generation of video game consoles.
The base model includes an optical disc drive compatible with Ultra HD Blu-ray discs. The Digital Edition lacks this drive, allowing it to serve as a lower-cost model for those who prefer to buy games through digital download. The two variants were launched simultaneously.
The PlayStation 5's main hardware features include a solid-state drive customized for high-speed data streaming to enable significant improvements in storage performance, an AMD GPU capable of 4K resolution display at up to 120 frames per second, hardware-accelerated ray tracing for realistic lighting and reflections, and the Tempest Engine allowing for hardware-accelerated 3D audio effects. Other features include the DualSense controller with haptic feedback and backward compatibility with most of the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR games.
The lead architect of the PlayStation console line, Mark Cerny, implemented a two-year feedback cycle after the launch of the PlayStation 4. This entailed regularly visiting Sony's first-party developers at two-year intervals to find out what concerns they had with shortcomings in Sony's current hardware and how such hardware could be improved in console refreshes or for the next generation. This feedback was fed into the priorities for the console development team. In the development of the PlayStation 5, a key issue was the length of loading times for games. This is based on the size of data being loaded into the game, the physical location of data on the storage medium, and the duplication of data across the medium in order to reduce load times. An important goal was to find ways to reduce loading time, particularly in games that stream or dynamically load new game areas as the player moves through the game world.[5]
The internal storage of the PlayStation 5 is a custom-built 825 GB solid-state drive (667 GB available)[41] with a 12-channel interface, achieving a raw throughput of 5.5 GB/s. This atypical drive size was found to be optimal for the 12-channel pathway rather than a more common 512 GB or 1 TB unit. With a dedicated decompression unit supporting zlib and the new Oodle Kraken protocol from RAD Game Tools, the unit has a typical throughput of 8–9 GB/s.[33] Mark Cerny stated that a fast SSD was the top request from game developers so the goal not only was to have a theoretical raw read speed 100 times faster than PS4, but to eliminate input/output (I/O) bottleneck points so the performance target could be made effective. To this end, Sony designed a custom chip with multiple coprocessors to work in unison with the flash memory controller to reduce latency and channel data more efficiently around the system. At peak, the custom unit is capable of processing up to 22 GB/s of compressible data.[42]