PlayStation 5 Will Be Far More Power Efficient than Its Predecessor

[Tsing]

Sony is doing its part in "Playing for the Planet," a pledge taken by game industry giants to "harness the power of their platforms to take action in response to the climate crisis." SIE President and CEO Jim Ryan revealed that the PlayStation 5 would feature "much lower" power consumption than the PS4: in suspend mode, the console will use just 0.5 W.

This follows the company's later efforts with the PS4, which was improved with "efficient technologies such as System-on-a-Chip architecture integrating a high-performance graphics processor, die shrink, power scaling, as well as energy saving modes such as Suspend-to-RAM." Sony claims it has avoided almost 16 million metric tons of carbon emissions to date.

I am also very pleased to announce the next generation PlayStation console will include the possibility to suspend gameplay with much lower power consumption than PS4 (which we estimate can be achieved at around 0.5 W). If just one million users enable this feature, it would save equivalent to the average electricity use of 1,000 US homes.

 

[Brian_B]

You know what saves even more power? Unplugging it.

This is (minorly) cool and all, but it won't be a sales point at all.

I do like that my PS4 can do auto-updates while in suspend. I hate that it's tied to PS Plus though. I suspect that's the part they aren't mentioning here .. "If it's enabled" meaning "if you pay extra for it"

 

[DrezKill]

I've got systems hooked up from 3rd gen all the way through 8th gen, and I don't leave most of them plugged in. They are hooked up to TVs at almost all times, but when I'm not using them I usually unplug their power cords. Even when I do leave newer systems plugged in, I disable their standby modes. When I turn my systems off, I want them to go all the way off. I like that fat PS3 and fat PS2 have main power supply switches on the backs of those consoles. Don't have to unplug them if I can just flip a main switch. For the Nintendo Switch though, I usually just put it to sleep rather than do full power off. Still, it's cool that Sony wants to make their console hardware more power efficient. All consoles should strive for such (but not at the cost of performance). Lower power usage also means less heat produced, which is great for the one room where I keep my desktop PC, an HDTV, a CRT TV, 3 speaker systems (one for PC and one for each TV), and most of my consoles. I expect Microsoft's next system to be more efficient as well.