Sony PlayStation 5 Specs: Faster Loading Times Than Xbox Series X?

In a live stream last night, Sony has finally announced to the world the list of specs that their highly anticipated console, the PlayStation 5 (PS5), will ship with. Unfortunately, there were no clues as to how the console would look like, or how much it would cost.

The most eye-catching feature would definitely be the 5.5GB/s speed of the 825GB NVMe SSD. With Microsoft announcing that their Xbox Series X would only have 2.4GB/s of performance, that means that loading times could be massively faster on the PS5. Large open-world games like The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2 and more could run much more smoothly on the PS5, making it a much better proposition for those types of games.

Both consoles are using eight-core AMD Zen 2 processors, although the cores for the PS5 clock at 3.5GHz and the Xbox Series X’s cores clock at 3.8GHz each. With Simultaneous Multithreading though, the Xbox X’s cores drop to 3.6GHz, so it’s not too big a difference from the PS5’s.

The GPU is another major differing point though. Both companies have opted for custom AMD RDNA-2 based GPUs, but the PS5 only has 10.8 teraflops of computing power with their 36 compute units while the Xbox has a whopping 12 teraflops with 52 compute units.

Both consoles have 16GB of GDDR6 memory, a 4K UHD Blu-ray optical drive and support 4K, 8K and HDR content.

In an interview with Eurogamer, PS5 Lead System Architect Mark Cerny explains that due to the use of variable frequencies, the console is “given a set power budget tied to the thermal limits of the cooling assembly”.

Cerny also teased the console’s cooling solutions, stating “As for the details of the cooling solution, we’re saving them for our teardown – I think you’ll be quite happy with what the engineering team came up with.”

Something else that’s exciting is that there will be 3D audio for the PS5. We’ve tried out Sony’s 3D audio technology before and it’s rather impressive, so hopefully, the PS5 will wow us here as well.

Guess we’ll have to wait for Sony to reveal even more details. As of now, one of the most important pieces of information, the price, is still not available. And that is what will sway a lot of gamers when the time comes to make a purchase decision.

The full reveal can be watched above.