PS5 vs PS4 2026: 5.6x Faster GPU, Yet Still Outsold

There is a version of this comparison that writes itself in ninety seconds. The PlayStation 5 is faster than the PlayStation 4 in every measurable way, it plays almost the entire PS4 library, and it is the console Sony would very much like you to buy. Article over. Go home.

That version is also useless, because it ignores the single strangest fact in this generation of hardware: in 2026, the machine that is objectively worse on paper is still selling more units than the machine that replaced it. The PS4 is thirteen years old. It has been officially superseded, partially de-featured, and priced out of retail existence. And it is still winning the only race Sony actually cares about. That contradiction is the story, and this comparison is going to take it seriously rather than pretend it away.

The Short Version, For People With a Cart Open

If you have a shopping tab open in another window and no patience for 7,000 words, here is the honest compression of everything below. Read the rest anyway, because the interesting part is why these answers are correct, but this is the executive summary.

The one-line answer

Buy a PS5 if you own a 4K television, care about frame rate, or intend to keep the console for the next five years. Buy a used PS4 if you want the cheapest possible way to play a genuinely enormous back catalogue and you are comfortable with 1080p and thirty-second load screens. There is almost no third category where the decision is genuinely hard, and the reason it is not hard is price, not performance.

What the machines actually cost right now

A used PS4 runs roughly $70 to $100 in the United States, per Austin Evans' 2026 breakdown of the second-hand market. A new disc-model PS5, following Sony's April 2026 price increase, costs $649.99. The Digital Edition is $599.99. The PS5 Pro is $899.99. That is not a range of options across a similar price band; that is a $70 machine against a $650 machine. When people say the PS4 is "the best deal in gaming," they are not being sentimental. They are doing arithmetic.

What changed in 2026

Two things reshaped this comparison in the first half of 2026. First, Sony raised PS5 prices again in April, the second increase in under a year, pushing the flagship console further away from impulse-buy territory. Second, the PS4 refused to die on schedule: it kept outselling the PS5 in the trailing twelve months and stayed ahead at the aligned point in each console's lifecycle. The gap between "better hardware" and "better value" has never been wider, and 2026 is the year it became impossible to ignore.

The Sales Paradox: The Older Console Is Still Winning

Start with the number that should not exist. According to VGChartz's December 2025 sales comparison, when you line the two consoles up by the equivalent point in each one's life, the PlayStation 4 was ahead of the PlayStation 5 by 2,276,750 units. Not behind. Ahead. And over the trailing twelve months, the PS4 outsold the PS5 by 790,393 units. A console that launched in 2013 moved more hardware in 2025 than the one Sony has spent five years marketing as the future.

The five-year photo finish

Zoom out to the anniversary framing and the picture stays uncomfortably close. By the PS5's fifth birthday in November 2025, its cumulative sales sat at roughly 84.2 million units, as reported by TechRadar off Sony's own earnings disclosure. At the same point in its life, the PS4 had reached about 86 million. That is a deficit of under two million units across five years of shipments, which in console terms is a rounding error dressed up as a lead. Sony's own forecasting reflected the tension: the company projected around 15 million PS5 units for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2026, versus the 17.8 million the PS4 managed at the comparable stage. Even Sony's optimistic math had the new console trailing the old one.

Why the paradox is real and not a glitch

It is tempting to wave this away as a quirk of a single tracker, but the shape holds across sources and regions. The lifetime figures are not close — the PS4 sits around 117 million units sold against the PS5's low-90s — because the PS4 had a seven-year head start and a monster mid-life. The aligned comparison is the one that stings, because it strips out the head start and asks a cleaner question: is the PS5 selling faster than the PS4 did at the same age? And the answer, in late 2025 and into 2026, is no. Pandemic-era supply shortages kneecapped the PS5's launch window, and then, just as supply normalised, Sony started raising prices instead of cutting them. A console that gets more expensive four and five years into its life is running the generational playbook backwards, and the sales curve shows it.

What this means for a buyer

Here is the practical takeaway, because sales charts are otherwise just spectator sport. The reason the PS4 is still selling is the reason you might still buy one: the software gap that normally kills a last-gen console has not arrived. The games are still coming to PS4. The cross-play still works. The library is colossal and cheap. Sales paradoxes do not persist for five years by accident; they persist because millions of buyers are quietly concluding that the older, cheaper machine is the rational purchase. That is a data point, not a mistake.

The Spec Sheet, Decoded (And One Number Everyone Gets Wrong)

Now the fun part, where the PS5 gets to flex, because on raw hardware there is no contest whatsoever. Push Square's full tech-specs comparison puts it bluntly: "The PS5 smokes its predecessor in every category." That is accurate, with exactly one asterisk we will get to. Here is the full board.

The CPU and GPU figures come from Back Market's PS4-vs-PS5 spec breakdown, cross-checked against Push Square's numbers. There is no category on this table where the PS4 wins, and the storage caveat — that unorthodox 825 GB SSD is actually smaller than the 1 TB configurations the PS4 shipped in — is the asterisk Push Square was pointing at. A smaller drive that reads fifty times faster is not a real loss, but it is technically the one row where the PS5 gave something up.

The teraflop lie you will see everywhere

Now for the number everyone gets wrong. Best Buy's own PS4-vs-PS5 explainer states that the PS5's 10.3 teraflops are "almost nine times more" than the PS4's 1.84 teraflops. It is a tidy, quotable claim, and it is wrong. Do the division yourself:

PS5 GPU throughput:  10.28 TFLOPS
PS4 GPU throughput:   1.84 TFLOPS

10.28 / 1.84 = 5.59x   -> the base PS5 is ~5.6x the base PS4

Where does "9x" come from?
16.7 (PS5 Pro) / 1.84 (PS4) = 9.08x   <- THIS is the ~9x figure

The "almost nine times" multiplier is real, but it belongs to the PS5 Pro, whose 16.7 TFLOPS genuinely lands around nine times the base PS4. The base PS5 is roughly 5.6 times the PS4, which is still an enormous generational leap — it just is not nine. If you want the console that actually earns the nine-times headline, that is a different, pricier conversation covered in our PS5 Pro versus base PS5 breakdown. For the machine most people are choosing between, 5.6x is the honest figure, and anyone quoting nine is either citing the wrong console or repeating Best Buy's arithmetic without checking it.

Where the raw numbers actually cash out

Teraflops are a lab statistic; the reason they matter is what they enable. The GPU jump is why the PS5 hits native 4K where the PS4 targets 1080p. The Zen 2 CPU running at more than double the clock of the ancient Jaguar cores is why open-world games can push denser simulation and higher, steadier frame rates. And the memory bandwidth — 448 GB/s against 176 GB/s, per Push Square — is the quiet hero, because streaming a modern open world's textures at 60 FPS is a bandwidth problem before it is anything else. The PS4's Jaguar CPU was a budget mobile part in 2013; by 2020 it was the bottleneck strangling ambitious cross-gen games. The PS5 fixed that. On paper, this is a blowout.

The SSD: The One Genuine Revolution

If you strip the PS5 down to a single feature that is not merely "more of what the PS4 had," it is the solid-state drive. Everything else — more compute, more RAM, more bandwidth — is a quantitative jump. The SSD is a qualitative one, and it is the only part of this comparison where the PS5 does something the PS4 fundamentally cannot.

Cerny's 0.8-second party trick

The definitive demonstration is now five years old and still the clearest thing anyone has said on the subject. In his March 2020 "Road to PS5" technical talk, lead system architect Mark Cerny loaded a fast-travel jump in Marvel's Spider-Man. On PS4, the transition took roughly fifteen seconds. On a PS5 prototype, the same jump completed in 0.8 seconds — an 18-fold reduction. Cerny's framing was the important part: "The primary reason for an ultra-high-speed SSD," he said, "is that it gives the game designer freedom," adding that the drive could "load 2 GB of content in a quarter of a second." One honest caveat that Push Square later documented: the specific Spider-Man demo was captured on an early, low-speed devkit, so the 0.8-second figure is a floor, not a ceiling. The point stands regardless.

The numbers behind the trick: Push Square lists the PS5's custom SSD at 5.5 GB/s of raw throughput against the PS4's mechanical hard drive at roughly 50–100 MB/s. That is not a percentage improvement; it is a change of unit. Back Market frames the practical result more conservatively at "up to 6 times faster" load times in real games, which is the sensible, shipped-software version of Cerny's lab demo. Both are true. The lab number tells you what the hardware can do; the six-times figure tells you what you will actually feel.

Why this matters more than 4K

Here is an opinion the spec sheet cannot give you: the SSD is a bigger deal than the resolution jump. A 1080p game on a PS4 still looks fine on most televisions from ten feet away. But a thirty-second load screen every time you die, fast-travel, or boot the game is a tax you pay in minutes of your life, repeatedly, forever. The SSD abolishes that tax. It is the difference you notice within the first five minutes and never stop appreciating, whereas the 4K difference is the one you have to squint for. If you only ever internalise one reason the PS5 is a better machine to live with, it is this one.

The maintenance footnote

One practical note that the marketing never mentions: SSDs are not immune to the console slowly gumming up over years of installs, updates, and cache bloat. Load times can creep, the UI can stutter, and the fix is the same boring ritual it has always been. If your PS5 starts feeling less instant than it did on day one, our PS5 cache-clear walkthrough covers the Safe Mode routine that restores most of the snappiness. The SSD is a revolution, but it is not a self-cleaning one.

Price in 2026: The Two Numbers That End the Debate

Everything above makes the PS5 sound like a foregone conclusion. Then you look at the price, and the foregone conclusion quietly falls apart. This is the section where the comparison stops being about silicon and starts being about your wallet.

The April 2026 hike that broke the argument

On March 27, 2026, Sony announced its second PS5 price increase in under a year, effective April 2. The company's VP of global marketing, Isabelle Tomatis, put it plainly on the PlayStation Blog: "With continued pressures in the global economic landscape, we've made the decision to increase the prices of PS5, PS5 Pro, and PlayStation Portal remote player globally." As Tom's Hardware and CNBC reported, the disc PS5 jumped $100 to $649.99, the Digital Edition rose $100 to $599.99, the PS5 Pro climbed $150 to $899.99, and even the PlayStation Portal went up $50 to $249.99. The drivers were an AI-fuelled memory-chip shortage that pushed DRAM prices up sharply year-over-year, plus new semiconductor tariffs. The console got more expensive because the components got more expensive, and Sony declined to eat the difference.

Reading the regional tea leaves

A note on sources, because prices in this category are a minefield of stale listings. What Hi-Fi's upgrade guide still pegs the disc PS5 at £449 (about $499) and the Digital Edition at £359 (about $399) — figures that reflect UK pricing and predate the April 2026 global hike, so treat them as historical rather than current. On the used side, Back Market's June 21, 2026 snapshot lists a refurbished PS4 at €205 against a PS5 at €549, which is roughly the same halved-price relationship you see in the US second-hand market. The exact figure moves by region and by week; the ratio does not. Wherever you shop, a used PS4 lands at somewhere around half the cost of a PS5, and often much less.

The number that actually decides it

So here are the two numbers, side by side, that end most of this debate before the spec sheet gets a vote: $70–$100 for a used PS4, versus $649.99 for a new disc PS5. Best Buy's guide notes the same gap in gentler language — the PS5 "typically costs a couple hundred dollars more," with the PS4 Pro sitting about $100 below a PS5 — but the used-market reality is starker than the retail framing. When the better machine costs six to nine times as much as the good-enough machine, "which is better" stops being the right question. The right question is "how much better, and is it worth that multiple to you." For a lot of buyers, honestly, it is not.

Backward Compatibility and Game Boost: The PS4's Escape Hatch

The feature that makes this comparison genuinely complicated — and the reason the PS4 sales paradox persists — is that the PS5 plays almost everything the PS4 does. Backward compatibility is usually the polite fiction that lets a company retire an old console. Here it is a real, load-bearing feature, and it cuts both ways.

What actually runs, and how well

The PS5 is compatible with the overwhelming majority of the PS4's 4,000-plus game library — the figure Sony and independent testers land on is 99%-plus. More importantly, it does not just run them; it improves many of them for free through Game Boost. Digital Foundry's verdict, delivered in a video they bluntly titled "PlayStation 5 Backwards Compatibility Tested — And It's Fantastic," was that games with uncapped frame rates or dynamic resolution frequently jump to a locked 60 FPS on PS5 with no patch at all. Their headline examples: Days Gone and Ghost of Tsushima, both of which shed their PS4-era frame-rate wobble and hold a steady 60. Push Square's Game Boost catalogue documents dozens more.

The 30 FPS wall

The catch, and it is a real one, is that Game Boost only helps games that were technically allowed to run faster. Titles hard-locked to 30 FPS — the canonical example being Bloodborne, which remains stubbornly capped — get nothing from the PS5's raw power without an actual developer patch, and many will never receive one. So the PS5's backward-compatibility story is genuinely excellent, but it is not uniform. Some of your PS4 favourites will feel reborn; a few of the most beloved ones will run exactly as they did in 2015, on faster hardware that is contractually forbidden from helping them. It is worth checking whether the specific games you care about are Boost-eligible before you assume the upgrade transforms your library.

The strategic reading

Step back and the backward-compatibility picture explains the whole market. What Hi-Fi's upgrade guide makes the uncomfortable observation out loud: "there are almost no titles in its entire catalogue that can't also be played on PS4." For most of this generation, the PS5's own exclusives could be counted on your hands, because Sony kept shipping its big releases cross-gen to reach that 117-million-strong PS4 install base. That decision was rational for Sony and quietly devastating for the PS5's upgrade pitch: if the new console's headline games also run on the old one, the SSD and the 4K are luxuries, not necessities. Backward compatibility is the PS5's best feature and the PS4's best excuse to stick around, simultaneously.

The DualSense, 3D Audio, and 4K: Features That Actually Land

Beyond raw throughput, the PS5 introduced a handful of genuinely new experiences that the PS4 has no answer for. Not all of them matter equally, and the deadpan truth is that some are transformative while others are demo-reel filler. Here is the honest triage.

The DualSense is the real upgrade

The single most convincing next-gen feature is the one in your hands. The DualSense controller's haptic feedback and adaptive triggers do something the DualShock 4's rumble motors simply cannot: they convey texture and resistance. Drawing a bow that stiffens under tension, feeling individual raindrops patter across the pad, sensing the crunch of gravel versus mud — these are not gimmicks in the games that bother to implement them well. Sony's pack-in Astro's Playroom exists specifically to demonstrate this, and it remains the best two hours of controller-as-instrument design on any console. If you play a PS5 game with strong DualSense support and then go back to a DualShock 4, the older pad feels inert. This is the feature that most reliably justifies the phrase "next-gen."

4K, 120 FPS, and 3D audio: nice, conditional, situational

The rest is more contingent. Native 4K and up to 120 FPS output are real and genuinely lovely — on a 4K, high-refresh television. On a 1080p60 set, which plenty of people still own, a large fraction of that advantage evaporates, and you are paying for pixels your panel cannot draw. Tempest 3D AudioTech is similar: excellent through headphones, largely academic through TV speakers. Austin Evans, comparing PS4 and PS5 versions of the same games in 2026, landed on exactly this nuance — the PS5 "loaded up a lot more quickly and played more smoothly," but there was "not really a dramatic difference" in how the games actually looked. His summary of the PS4 versions: lower-resolution textures, shorter draw distances, and simpler lighting, but the same content and features as the PS5 releases. That is the enthusiast's honest concession — the gap is real, but on a normal television with normal eyes, it is smaller than the price gap implies.

The features that let the PS5 leave the room

One category where the PS5 quietly pulls ahead is what it lets you do away from the console. Remote Play matured substantially on PS5, and paired with the PlayStation Portal it turns your library into something you can stream to a handheld screen around the house — a use case the PS4 technically supported but never nailed. If that appeals, our PS5 Remote Play setup guide covers getting a clean 1080p stream running. And for owners chasing the absolute best image quality, Sony's machine-learning upscaler continues to expand across the catalogue; our rundown of the enhanced PSSR rollout across 50 games is worth a look, though that particular perk lives on the pricier Pro hardware. The PS4 has no equivalent to any of this. It is a box that plays games on the television it is plugged into, and nothing more.

Five Buyers, Five Answers

Generic recommendations are useless because nobody is a generic buyer. So here are five concrete people, and the machine each of them should actually purchase. Find the one closest to you.

The first-console buyer and the budget student

Buy a used PS4. If this is your entry into console gaming, or you are a student whose budget has three digits and the first one is a 1, the math is not close. A $70–$100 PS4 gets you a library of thousands of games, most of them now deeply discounted, and current cross-gen releases like the latest Call of Duty, Fortnite, and Marvel Rivals still run and still cross-play with PS5 users. Austin Evans called the used PS4 "the best deal in gaming" for exactly this buyer, and he is right. Spend the $550 you save on games, or on nothing, and enjoy not spending it.

The 4K home-theatre enthusiast

Buy a PS5, disc model. If you have invested in a 4K, high-refresh television and a decent sound system, the PS5 is the only machine here that can feed it. Native 4K, up to 120 FPS, ray tracing, 3D audio through your headphones, and 4K UHD Blu-ray playback from the disc drive — this is the buyer the PS5 was designed for, and the one for whom the $649.99 is defensible. The Digital Edition saves you $50 but forfeits both physical games and 4K Blu-ray movies, which for a home-theatre person is a strange thing to give up.

The lapsed player returning for the exclusives

It depends on the games. If you drifted away and want back in for the marquee single-player titles, check the frame-rate situation on the specific games you care about. Boost-eligible PS4 games run beautifully on a PS5; hard-locked ones like Bloodborne do not improve without a patch. If your wishlist is full of Boost-friendly titles, a PS5 makes them shine. If it is a nostalgia tour of 30 FPS classics, a cheap PS4 plays them identically for a fraction of the cost.

The casual cross-play social gamer

Keep or buy a PS4. If your gaming is mostly Fortnite with friends, the occasional Call of Duty session, and some couch multiplayer, the PS4 remains entirely adequate. It cross-plays with PS5 lobbies, runs the current live-service giants, and does everything a casual social gamer needs at 1080p. Evans found Fortnite "a little slower but still fine" on PS4, which is the whole review for this buyer. You will not be left out of the party.

The existing PS5 owner eyeing an upgrade

Do not buy a base PS5; consider the Pro or wait. If you already own a launch PS5, there is no reason on earth to buy a second base unit. Your upgrade path, if you have one at all, is the PS5 Pro — and even that is a luxury purchase at $899.99 that only pays off on high-end displays. We laid out the full cost-benefit in our PS5 Pro 2026 breakdown; the short version is that a roughly 45%-faster GPU for a $250 premium over the base console is a connoisseur's buy, not a necessity. Most existing PS5 owners should keep what they have.

Pros and Cons, Tabulated

For the scanners, here is each console reduced to its honest ledger. No marketing verbs, just the trade-offs as they actually shake out in 2026.

PlayStation 5

PlayStation 4

How to read this ledger

Notice the shape of it. The PS5's cons are almost all about price and diminishing marginal returns; its capabilities are not in question. The PS4's cons are almost all about capability and a support clock running out; its value is not in question. That is the whole comparison in two tables. You are not choosing a better or worse machine. You are choosing which category of compromise you would rather accept: pay a lot for power you may not fully use, or pay almost nothing for a machine on a fourteen-year lifecycle that is quietly approaching its end.

Migrating From PS4 to PS5 Without Losing Your Saves

Say you have decided to upgrade. The good news is that Sony made the PS4-to-PS5 transition one of the smoother generational moves in console history, precisely because the two machines share a software ecosystem. The bad news is that a few sharp edges will cost you saves or money if you are not paying attention. Here is the clean path.

The transfer itself

You have three ways to move your data, in rough order of preference:

1. Wired LAN transfer — connect both consoles to the same network (ideally via Ethernet), sign into the same PSN account on both, and use the PS5's built-in Data Transfer tool. This is the fastest method for large libraries and moves games, saves, and settings in one pass.
2. PS Plus cloud saves — if you subscribe, upload your PS4 saves to the cloud, then download them on the PS5. Clean, wireless, and account-bound, though limited by your storage tier.
3. USB drive — back your PS4 saves up to an external drive, then import them on the PS5. The universal fallback that needs no subscription and no network.

A minimal checklist, in the order that avoids tears:

# PS4 side, before you touch the PS5
1. Update PS4 to the latest firmware
2. Back up saves:  Settings > Application Saved Data Management
                   -> Saved Data in System Storage > Copy to USB / Upload to Cloud
3. Note which games have PS5 upgrade versions (some are free, some are paid)

# PS5 side
4. Sign in with the SAME PSN account
5. Run Data Transfer (Settings > System > System Software > Data Transfer)
   OR download cloud saves (Settings > Saved Data and Game/App Settings)
6. Re-download PS4 games from your library (backward compatible)
7. Import saves from USB if you used that route

# Do NOT do this
- Do not delete PS4 saves until they are confirmed on the PS5
- Do not assume a PS4 save auto-upgrades a paid PS5 version for free

The gotchas that cost real money

Two traps deserve a flashing light. First, not every PS4-to-PS5 game upgrade is free. Some publishers hand you the PS5 version at no cost; others charge a "next-gen" upgrade fee, and a handful gate the save transfer behind owning the upgraded edition. Check each game individually before you assume your progress carries over. Second, a PS4 save does not always drop cleanly into the PS5 version of the same game — cross-gen save compatibility is per-title, and a few notable games wall it off entirely. The rule that keeps you safe is the one in the code block: never delete a PS4 save until you have physically confirmed it loading on the PS5.

What to do with the old console

Do not immediately sell the PS4, for two reasons. One, you may need it as a fallback if a save transfer fails or a specific game refuses to migrate. Two, the resale value is low enough — that same $70–$100 — that keeping it as a guest-room or second-TV machine often beats the trivial cash you would recover. If you do sell, deactivate it as your primary PSN console and factory-reset it first. And if you are keeping it, a quick cache-and-database clean before it goes into semi-retirement will keep it responsive; the Safe Mode routine is the same idea across both generations.

The Verdict: Who Buys What

After 6,000 words, the deadpan conclusion is almost anticlimactic, because the data points in one clear direction and then price drags it halfway back. Here is where everything lands.

The PS5 wins the machine; the PS4 wins the deal

On hardware, this is not a debate. The PS5 is roughly 5.6 times the GPU, more than double the memory bandwidth, and roughly fifty times the storage throughput of the PS4. Push Square's "smokes it in every category" is simply accurate. The SSD alone justifies the generation, the DualSense is the best controller Sony has ever shipped, and backward compatibility means you sacrifice nothing from your PS4 library — you inherit it, frequently improved. If money were no object, everyone would own a PS5 and this article would be one sentence long.

But money is the object. Sony spent 2025 and 2026 raising prices into a memory shortage and a tariff regime, and the result is a flagship console that costs $649.99 while its thirteen-year-old predecessor sells used for $70. That is why the PS4 keeps outselling the PS5 in the trailing twelve months, why it stayed 2,276,750 units ahead at the aligned mark, and why it reached 86 million to the PS5's 84.2 million at the five-year line. Millions of buyers ran the same calculation you just watched me run, and concluded that "good enough for a tenth of the price" beats "objectively better."

The data-backed recommendation

So the recommendation, stated cleanly: Buy the PS5 if you have a 4K television and you plan to keep the console for years — the SSD and the DualSense will earn their keep every single day, and you are buying into the platform's future, not its past. Buy the disc model over the Digital Edition unless you are certain you will never touch a physical game or a 4K Blu-ray; the $50 saving is a false economy for most buyers. Buy a used PS4 if your budget is tight, your television is 1080p, or you mostly play cross-gen and live-service games — you will spend a fraction of the money for the overwhelming majority of the experience, and the games you want are still coming. Skip the base-to-base upgrade entirely if you already own a PS5; the only sideways move worth considering is the Pro, and only on a high-end display.

The uncomfortable last word

Here is the part the manufacturers hate. The most defensible purchase in this comparison, for the largest number of people, is the worse console. Not because the PS5 is bad — it is excellent — but because Sony priced the generational leap higher than the leap is worth to a normal player on a normal television. The PS4's fourteen-year lifecycle is winding down; Tournaments and Teams already went dark in October 2025, and new-game support tapers through 2026 and 2027. It is a machine with a visible expiry date. And it is still the smarter buy for millions of people, which tells you less about the PS4's excellence than about how far the PS5's price has drifted from its value. The better console lost the value argument. In 2026, that is the whole story — and the sales charts have been telling it for a year. The broader shift in where gaming's money actually flows is a longer conversation, one we get into in our look at PC versus console economics through 2028. For now, buy the machine that fits your television and your wallet, not the one with the bigger number on the box.