Need to know

It looks slimline but hides plenty of gaming grunt. Here are the specs that really matter

The custom 825GB SSD inside PS5 is the console’s secret weapon. It ensures load times on PS5 are 100 times faster than on PS4, according to Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida. The

SSD ensures PS5 games will be larger, more detailed, and run faster than those on currentgen consoles. It’s a claim backed by Epic Games’ VP of engineering, Nick Penwarden, who revealed the tech giant had to rewrite the core I/O subsystems for Unreal Engine with PlayStation 5 in mind.

The custom CPU and GPU are a powerful combo. At this year’s tech crunch stream Mark Cerny revealed the console delivers 3.5GHz frequencies – PlayStation 5 runs eight Zen 2 cores at 3.5GHz (at variable frequencies), compared to PS4’s eight Jaguar cores at 1.6GHz. That represents a massive, generational leap in performance.

Some smart forward thinking means not only will PS5exclusive games run better on the hardware but PS4 games will also perform effortlessly; the CPU has two modes of operation and will switch depending on the game it’s running. Essentially, backward compatibility is handled through the GPU architecture and not code. It’s thought nearly 4,000 PS4 games will be able to run on PS5 at launch.

Sound will be a big step up over PS4, with Mark Cerny’s Tempest Engine delivering unprecedented 3D audio that will enable us to hear single raindrops or a speck of dirt hitting a car in a certain area. How many devs will go into such detail is unclear, but it represents new layers of gameplay to be explored as we can experience sound above, below, and around us.

“If we were to use the same algorithms as PS VR, that's enough for something like

5,000 sound sources – but of course we want to use more complex algorithms, and we don't need anything like that number of sounds,” said

Cerny on 18 March.