PlayStation 5 Will Be Backwards Compatible With Almost All 100 Most-Played PS4 Games At Launch

During the ‘Road to PS5’ streamed talk today hosted by system architect Mark Cerny, he confirmed that almost all Top 100 most-played PlayStation 4 titles will be backwards compatible on PlayStation 5 at launch.

During the talk, he talked about how certain early PS3s handled backwards compatibility by having PS2 chipset hardware inside it. This is why the compatibility was later scrapped in order to bring down costs. Instead, PlayStation 5 has built the logic of the PlayStation 4’s systems into the chipset, which means that games are able to be played natively, with boosts thanks to the PlayStation 5’s better hardware.

The reason why not all games are compatible from the start is because games are obviously not built to handle the boosts, and so may not work properly on the system. This is why each game needs to be checked one-by-one. However, most games tested so far from the Top 100 most-played PS4 titles by play time have had successful results.

Other topics touched upon during the talk includes 3D sound and audio devices, how the processor majorly shortens load times, and more.

Here is the full list of PlayStation 5 specs, which were shared by Eurogamer.

• CPU: 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz (variable frequency)
• GPU: 10.28 TFLOPs, 36 CUs at 2.23GHz (variable frequency)
• GPU Architecture: Custom RDNA 2
• Memory/Interface: 16GB GDDR6/256-bit
• Memory Bandwidth: 448GB/s
• Internal Storage: Custom 825GB SSD
• IO Throughput: 5.5GB/s (Raw), Typical 8-9GB/s (Compressed)
• Expandable Storage: NVMe SSD Slot
• External Storage: USB HDD Support
• Optical Drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray Drive

The PlayStation 5 will launch in 2020.