Page Text: 4K UHD Blu-ray Drive
The DualSense, the DualShock 4, and the competition. | Mike Williams/USG
Out of the box, the PS5 comes with almost everything you need to hook the system up. There's the DualSense controller, the power cable, an HDMI 2.1 cable, and a USB-C to USB-A cable for charging the DualSense. If you want to have a wired connection directly to your router, you'll need your own LAN cable.
The DualSense feels like a compromise between the DualShock 4 and the Xbox One controller, widening out the handles to better fit in my larger hands. The handles also include a cool mini-pattern of PlayStation symbols to add grip. The rest of the controller is just small design tweaks, with the Lightbar LEDs moving underneath the touchpad, and a USB-C port where the Lightbar used to be for charging the controller.
Welcome to the PS5's Home screen. | Mike Williams/USG, Sony
User Interface: Smoothing Over the PS4's UI
Turning on the PS5 for the first time, the LEDs around the upper end of the system (right side if horizontal) glow a soft PlayStation blue. Folks wanted to know if there were multiple colors to these LEDs, and there are. Like the PS4 Pro, they'll glow white in normal operation and orange in rest mode.
Though the opening screens of PS5's user interface hearken back to the PS3, once you log in on your PlayStation account, the actual home interface is a slightly-altered version of what you've seen on the PS4. The PlayStation Store retains its spot on the far left of a horizontal row of cards. Next up is the "Explore" section, which replaces the PS4's "What's New" section, and offers official news and videos for recently-played games. The rest of the bar is filled out by current games in the order you've installed or played them, ending in your Game Library section.
It's actually a bit odd how little the user interface has changed versus the PS4. Sections have been moved around, and there are more options available, but the general layout feels familiar and the font is the exact same. One major change is that Media has been shuffled into its own section of the homepage, so apps like Netflix, Disney+, or Crunchyroll no longer appear in your Game Library.
The Card system, the Switcher, and more of the PS5's UI. | Mike Williams/USG, Sony
There's also a shift in how the system handles pressing the PlayStation button while inside a game. On the PS4, doing so would dump you right back out to the home screen. On the PS5, it's an overlay of your game called the Control Center, featuring cards with official game news, what your friends are playing, and recent videos. It also offers a smaller version of the old PS4 home screen top bar, with sections for Home, Notifications, Downloads, Friends (now called Game Base), Music, Devices, Profile, and Power Settings. This new Control Center allows you to change settings, check downloads, or change device settings, all without actually leaving your game. It's a more elegant choice versus the PS4, and it works great here.
Control Center also includes the new Switcher, a feature that Sony hasn't talked much about. On the surface, this seems like a way to quickly switch between different games, similar to the Xbox Series X's Quick Resume. You'd think that it would save your current game state, allowing you to move to another seamlessly. It doesn't though. It lets you move from game to game, but jumping from Spider-Man: Miles Morales to Ghost of Tsushima or Astro's Playroom returned me to their respective title screens. The feature is sadly more of a way to quickly switch between games. The fact that the Switcher doesn't have save states honestly feels like a misstep.
Poking around other system settings in the PlayStation 5 also reveals a few new options. I've spoken about the DualSense's Adaptive Triggers being a game changer for immersive feedback, but not everyone wants their triggers to fight them. On the PS4, you only had a single toggle for vibration. With the PS5, you can change vibration intensity and trigger effect intensity to one of four levels in the Accessibility or Accessories sections, including disabling it entirely. Customized button assignments also return, and Sony has added more color tweaking options and text choices for readability.
This is how much storage you have available out of the box. | Mike Williams/USG, Sony
Benchmarking The New Storage Options
Overall storage space is an issue on PlayStation 5. Sony's decision to prioritize speed meant compromising space, with the PS5 offering only 646.7 GB of free space out of the box. That's small because the games themselves are getting bigger; Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is 133 GB on PS5 and you're likely to see similar Triple-A titles start to approach 100 GB in the rush to make 4K-ready assets. You can augment your storage with an external hard drive, but any game you install on it won't benefit from the architecture of the main drive. (There is a slot for M.2 SSDs, but Sony has confirmed that support won't be available at launch .)
My current solution is to run my old PS4 games off the external drive, but given that modern games are starting to become prohibitively large, this feels like a stop gap solution. Sony was obviously aligned with this solution though, as there's a toggle in Storage settings to make PS4 games automatically install on the external hard drive. You can copy your games straight from your PS4 to PS5 during setup, or you can copy them to the external drive on the PS4 and just move that drive over.
I actually had to move PS4 saves over manually via USB, as the PS5 would not connect to my PlayStation Plus cloud storage. The system separates PS5 and PS4 save data, and oddly enough, there doesn't currently look to be a way to move PS5 save data to a USB drive. I assume that's something that will be added with time.
You can set PS4 games to automatically download to external storage. | Mike Williams/USG, Sony
But how do those old games perform on the PS5 overall, assuming you have them on the system or an external hard drive? Here's a few benchmarks from my limited testing, using my PS4 Pro, PS5, and cheap 2 TB WD Easystore (USB 3.0 5400 RPM HDD) I picked up from Best Buy. For the purposes of testing, I loaded Ghost of Tsushima from the respective console's home screen, from the title menu into the game itself, and then tested Fast Travel from the two furthest points (Jogaku Temple to Azamo Bay). Here's my results.
Ghost of Tsushima - PlayStation 4 Pro
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