PlayStation 5 features and hardware announced: All you need to know about Sony's upcoming console

Sony has revealed the hardware and features that will power the gaming experience on its next-generation consoles. Here's a list of all the cool features that the PS5 has been confirmed to bring with it.

In a bid to fight the competition from rival console makers, Sony has announced its plans to launch a new and powerful gaming machine in the coming days. 

The company has taken the lid off the PlayStation 5 (PS5) -- a console it claims will revolutionise the industry and prove to be a leap forward for gaming consoles. Sony claims the PS5 will bring with it the best in class hardware, technology and features to bring to console gamers great gaming experiences. 

Although the development of the PS5 has been confirmed to be in the advanced stages, the company is unlikely to bring it to the market before next year. But considering the hardware that it's packing and the feature list it promises to come with, the PS5 may well just be worth the wait.

Here's a list of all the cool features that the PS5 has been confirmed to bring with it by its lead architect, Mark Cerney in a recent interview with The Wired. 

8-core Ryyzen APU

The PS5 is going to get an upgrade from the current generation Jaguar family of CPUs currently used by the console makers to power their gaming machines. Instead, the upcoming console will pack AMD's upcoming third-generation Ryzen APUs. But what will truly set this APU apart is the fact that it will be the first mainstream x86 architecture chip to be built using the cutting-edge 7nm manufacturing process.

AMD Navi GPUs

While the AMD APUs come with on-chip graphics, the PS5 will not be depending on them for gaming performance. Rather for complex compute calculations, the PS5 will use a GPU built on the AMD’s next-gen Radeon Navi architecture. The Navi range of GPUs -- much like AMDs third generation Ryzen CPUs -- have not been launched in the market yet so there is scarce information on how powerful these GPUs will be exactly. However, from what is known, they should provide quite a step-up over the current generation GPUs fitted inside the PS4 line-up. 

To support Ray tracing and backward compatibility for PS4 games

The new PS5 has also been confirmed to support backward compatibility for PS4 games. While this will most likely be made possible because both consoles use the same x86 architecture chips to run games, it's the Ray Tracing claim that is more interesting. 

While Ray Tracing till now has been an Nvidia GPU trick, available fully only on the high-end RTX series cards, Mark Cerney's claim that the PS5 will support the technology suggests that AMD has figured out a way to bring the technology with its graphics chips in the future. 

Fast SSDs, support for 8K graphics, and more

The PS5 has also been confirmed to bring with it support for 8K graphics, 3D audio and super fast SSDs. While 8K graphics and 3D audio support come as welcome news, it is the addition of the SSDs that could prove to be the biggest upgrade come the launch of the PS5.  

As is true for any PC, SSDs can be a great upgrade and a sure shot way of boosting speeds and overall performance. With Sony's PS5 now getting an SSD instead of a mechanical hard drive as is the case with the PS4, we could well see the new console outperforming existing platforms by a huge margin.