The PS5 has been out for a year now, ushering in the latest generation alongside the Xbox S/X. The leap between generations is seemingly the same song and dance Sony has been doing since the '90s but this time, there's uncharted territory thanks to it launching in the midst of a pandemic when game delays are in abundance.

Yet, while we're a year on, PS5's are still suffering from stock shortages while scalpers are still turning profits - the PS5 is hot. Everybody wants one. But if you get the chance, should you even buy it?

The standard PS5 sets you back $499 and the digital variant is slightly cheaper at $399, so it's not something you should decide on a whim. Give it some thought - we'll help.

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Updated on November 19, 2021, by James Troughton: PlayStation has had a great first year, outselling even the Nintendo Switch - the first console to do that in three years. That's an achievement - or rather, it's a trophy. But is it worth buying? With the holidays approaching and 2022 rearing its head, we look at what's next for Sony.

Exclusive PS5 Games

The Fixer from Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

The PlayStation has a few hits set to launch in 2022. Sony has announced God of War: Ragnarok, Relayer, Horizon Forbidden West, Ghostwire Tokyo, Pragmata, and Gran Turismo 7. Although, given we're still in the midst of a pandemic, delays are always possible.

Right now, the following games are available:

Sony also announced a few new games that we can expect in the coming years - there's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the Knights of the Old Repub🧸lic remake, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel's Spider-Man 2, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel's Wolverine, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 16, but those won't be here for a while.

PS4 Games With PS5 Updates

There are also a whole host of PS4 games that have been given upgrades to both their FPS and resolution. In some cases, these games even got ray-tracing and Dualsense support. The full list is as follཧows:

A Plague Tale: Innocence

Assassin's Creed Valhalla

Borderlands 3

Control

Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time

Dead by Daylight

Destiny 2

DIRT 5

Doom Eternal

FIFA 21

Final Fantasy 7 Remake

For Honor

Guilty Gear Strive

Hades

Immortals Fenyx Rising

Maneater

Marvel's Avengers

Nioh 2

No Man's Sky

Outriders

Ride 4

Saints Row: The Third Remastered

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2

The Elder Scrolls Online

Watch Dogs Legion

Yakuza: Like a Dragon

The upgrades make these games much smoother and they take advantage of higher resolution monitors - far better than the PS4 Pro - but for $400, whether that's worth it or not is up for debate.

As for the exclusives, you can currently play Miles Morales and Sackboy on PS4; Returnal is a brilliant tough-as-nails rogue-lite with no saving, so it isn't accessible to everybody; Astro's Playroom is a fantastic little tech demo that shows off the Dualsense, and Demon's Souls highlights the potential in the Dualsense with stunning next-gen visuals.

They all have merits and are highly rated games - the two Spider-Men releases are also a perfect showcase of how ray-tracing can enhance a game's visual prowess. Ultimately, if games are enough to sell you on hardware, then it'll be your call on whether enough of these are enticing enough for the plunge.

Backward Compatibility On The PS5

The Dancer boss from Dark Souls 3, with flaming sword

One of the major concerns when the PS5 was announced, was whether it would support backward compatibility. The Xbox One had a built-in emulator that let you play select 360 games, while the 360 let you dive into the original Xbox's catalog. The last time PlayStation had full backward compatibility was with the PS2, so it's been a while, to say the least.

Luckily, the majority of PS4 games can be played on PS5 with many, as mentioned prior, having both paid and free upgrades. That being said, going forward, PS5 upgrades for in-house PS4 games 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:will cost $10.

At any rate, if you have an external hard drive, you can simply plug it into your PS5 and pick up where you left off. PS4 discs work on PS5 and pretty much every PS4 game you bought digitally is available on PS5. So, if you have a PS4 lying around and you want to make the upgrade, you could always check how much it's selling for. The cost for a PS5 might not be as steep when factoring in how much you'd make selling your old hardware.

PS5 Hardware

ps5s-(5)-final

The PlayStation 5 has eight Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz compared to the PS4 Pro's Jaguar 8 cores, and it has 10.28 TFLOPS, 36 CUs at 2.23GHz while the PS4 Pro has 4.20 TFLOPS. That's a lot of mumbo jumbo technical talk. In layman's terms, it's a lot faster, hence its support for ray-tracing.

However, it has a smaller hard drive. You get 825GB compared to the PS4 Pro's 1TB. Given how big games are getting, the hard drive doesn't store many, so you'll have to factor in the cost of an external hard drive, 168澳洲幸运♏5开奖网:or a compatible SSD to download PS5 games - HDDs are unable to play PS5 games.

The built-in storage is an SSD whereas the PS4 Pro's was an HDD. This means that you will get much faster loading times that are often inst💃antaneous. It also allows for games to do complex things such as loading levels within levels, as in the case of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.

However, you can upgrade your storage by adding an external SSD. 🔯This was a feature recently added to the console by way of an update, so you can download far more PS5 games than was possible on launch.

DualSense Controllers

DualSense - via Sony

Then there's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the Dualsense, PlayStation's brand new controller. It's slightly larger than the DualShock, shaped more like an Xbox controller, and comes with immersive haptic feedback, dynamic adaptive triggers, and a built-in microphone.

The adaptive triggers offer resistance that developers can use to imitate things such as gun jamming (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:as with Deathloop) or to have various firing modes depending on how much pressure you apply (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:as with Rift Apart). Returnal utilizes immersive haptic feedback to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:emulate the pitter-patter of rain in the palm of your hands, showing the potential to fu𝕴rther immersion. However, should this prove distracting, you can disable these features or even lower their inten🍌sity.

However, many PC games are beginning to add support for the Dualsense. If that's what sells you on a PS5 and you have a gaming PC already, then you may be better off simply purchasing a controller separately. For instance, Metro Exodus now boasts the same controller features as its PS5 counterpart.

PS5 Availability

PS5 - via Sony

The PS5 is often sold out across the board. Retailers regularly share updates on when new stock will come in so that people can prepare for the rush to grab one online, but scalpers often muddy the waters and take a huge chunk of the hardware, selling it on eBay and the like. We don't advise that you purchase them from scalpers as they will be sold at far higher prices tha💞n retail.

2022 will see a whole lot of exciting PS5 exclusives take advantage of the better hardware. However, Sony warns that microchip shortages are expected to continue well into next year, so it will remain hard to get your hands on one. If you can, however, it's worth the investment - they are quieter than PS4s and upgrades are being rolled out across the board, improving older titles.

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