PS5 will support ‘almost all’ of the top 100 PS4 games at launch

Sony’s next-gen console, PlayStation 5, will support nearly all of the top PlayStation 4 games at launch via backwards compatibility. In a presentation today, architect Mark Cerny said that results from the company’s tests have been “excellent” on the new console. “We recently took a look at the top 100 PlayStation 4 titles as ranked by playtime, and we’re expecting almost all of them to be playable at launch on PlayStation 5,” Cerny says. Sony has already said its new console will have backwards compatibility, though it hasn’t gone into detail on how that will work.

As part of the presentation today, Cerny explained that one way to enable backwards compatibility would be to put the previous console chipset into the system, as was done with some PlayStation 3 models. The downside is that it is “extremely expensive,” he said. It’s better to instead incorporate any differences in previous console’s logic into new console’s custom chips. “Even as the technology evolves the logic and feature set that PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro titles is still available in backwards compatibility modes,” Cerny said.

Once it’s in, it’s in. Over the last few months, Sony has released spec details about the PlayStation 5, including that it supports 8K resolutions, 3D audio, 4K gaming at 120Hz, contains an ultra-fast SSD, and will use an eight-core CPU custom GPU based on AMD’s Radeon Navi hardware. Today, it announced its full specifications for the system. PlayStation is expected to launch later this year.

Today’s announcements follow Microsoft’s full unveiling of Xbox Series X’s specs.