PS5 vs PS4 (2026): 5.6x the GPU, Still Outsold

Here is the number that ought to end the argument and instead starts it: the PlayStation 5's graphics processor is rated at 10.28 TFLOPS against the base PlayStation 4's 1.84 TFLOPS. That is a 5.6x increase in raw shader throughput — not the “almost nine times” you will read on a certain big-box retailer's explainer page, which we will get to, but a genuine, generation-defining leap all the same. The CPU went from a tablet-class 8-core Jaguar to a desktop-grade 8-core Zen 2. The memory doubled in size and skipped a generation of GDDR. The mechanical hard drive was ripped out and replaced with a custom SSD that moves data on the order of fifty times faster. By every metric an engineer cares about, the PS4 is a fossil.

And yet. As of mid-2026, the PlayStation 4 has outsold the PlayStation 5 by nearly 25 million units. It is the second-best-selling home console ever built, and its successor — five-and-a-half years into a generation, with 5.6 times the GPU — is still chasing its taillights. That is the paradox this comparison exists to explain, and it is a far more interesting story than any spec sheet.

So this is not a piece that will bravely conclude the newer box is better. Of course it is better; that is what “newer” has meant in silicon since 1972. This is a comparison about value, timing, and the specific, slightly absurd conditions of 2026 — a used PS4 you can have for the price of a AAA game, and a PS5 that has gotten more expensive with age — that make the older machine a defensible purchase and the newer one a genuine luxury good. Let's do the numbers, and then let's tell you which one to actually buy.

The Verdict, Up Front

We front-load the ruling because you have a life. The full argument, with tables and citations, follows below for the people who enjoy watching us show our work.

The one-sentence answer

If you own a modern 4K TV, want the marquee games of this generation, and can absorb a $599.99–$649.99 outlay, buy the PS5; it is faster in every measurable way and it is where every important game now lives. If you want to play games at all and would rather keep the difference, a used PS4 at $70–$100 is, in the words of tech reviewer Austin Evans, “the best deal in gaming,” and it is not close. Everyone else is choosing between those two poles.

Who should buy which

The PS5 is the correct machine for the performance-led buyer: 4K output, up to 120 fps, hardware ray tracing, the DualSense controller, and load times short enough to change how games are designed. The PS4 is the correct machine for the value-led buyer, the second-console household, the parent buying a first console for a kid who will scratch it, and anyone whose backlog is already several hundred hours of last-gen games they never finished. Both are, per Push Square's tech-specs guide, a lopsided fight on paper — “the PS5 smokes its predecessor in every category” — and yet the PS4 remains, in Evans' framing, “a functional and affordable gaming device” if your expectations are calibrated.

The asterisk stapled to every spec

Every performance number below comes with the same footnote: it only matters if a game is built to use it. Thanks to backward compatibility, roughly 99% of the 4,000-plus PS4 titles run on a PS5, which means for a huge slice of the catalogue the practical difference is “the same game, but it loads faster and holds its frame rate.” That is real and worth money. It is not the same thing as a visual revolution, and any comparison that pretends otherwise is selling you something.

The Spec Sheet: Where the Gap Lives

Let's lay the hardware on the table — all four machines, because the PS4 Pro and PS5 Pro are the only honest way to see where the generational line actually falls. Numbers are launch-spec; the original PS5 shipped with the 825 GB SSD quoted here, later Slim revisions moved to 1 TB.

CPU and memory: the boring parts that matter most

The graphics numbers get the headlines, but the CPU jump is arguably the bigger deal. The PS4's Jaguar cores were low-power parts even in 2013 — the kind of silicon you found in cheap laptops — and they became the single biggest bottleneck of the generation, the reason so many late PS4 games target 30 fps and miss. The PS5's Zen 2 is a real desktop architecture running at more than double the clock. That is why cross-gen games hold 60 fps on PS5 and stutter on PS4: it is frequently the processor, not the GPU, running out of headroom. Memory follows the same pattern — 16 GB of GDDR6 at roughly 448 GB/s versus 8 GB of GDDR5 at roughly 176 GB/s. Double the capacity, roughly 2.5x the bandwidth, and a generation of latency improvements the spec sheet does not even bother to quantify.

GPU and TFLOPS: the 5.6x, and the “9x” myth

Here is where we correct the record. Best Buy's own comparison page states the PS5's 10.28 TFLOPS is “almost nine times more” than the PS4's 1.84. It is a nice, round, wrong number. Do the division: 10.28 ÷ 1.84 = 5.59, which rounds to 5.6x. The “almost nine times” figure is real — it just belongs to the PS5 Pro, whose 16.7 TFLOPS is 9.1 times the base PS4. A retailer conflated the two, and the internet dutifully copied it. Retro-site rule of thumb: whenever a spec claim ends in a satisfyingly round multiplier, check the arithmetic yourself.

FP32 GPU throughput (single-precision shader math):

  PS4       1.84 TFLOPS   18 CU   GCN     2013
  PS4 Pro   4.20 TFLOPS   36 CU   GCN     2016
  PS5      10.28 TFLOPS   36 CU   RDNA 2  2020
  PS5 Pro  16.70 TFLOPS   60 CU   RDNA*   2024

  PS5     / PS4      = 10.28 / 1.84  = 5.6x   <- the honest headline
  PS5     / PS4 Pro  = 10.28 / 4.20  = 2.4x
  PS5 Pro / PS4      = 16.70 / 1.84  = 9.1x   <- where “9x” actually lives

Storage: 825 GB vs 500 GB, and the one place PS4 Pro wins

The PS5 ships with a custom 825 GB SSD; the base PS4 has a 500 GB mechanical hard drive. On raw speed there is no contest — more on that in a moment. But note the asterisk Push Square flags: after the operating system takes its cut, the PS5's usable space is not enormous, and a 1 TB PS4 Pro actually hands you more raw capacity than a launch PS5. In an era of 100 GB installs, the newer, faster drive fills up faster too. If your PS5 ever starts choking on a full drive or a corrupt cache, that is a maintenance problem with a known fix — we wrote the 12-step PS5 cache-clear walkthrough for exactly that afternoon.

The SSD Is the Whole Point

If you only internalize one section of this comparison, make it this one. The single largest experiential difference between a PS4 and a PS5 is not resolution and it is not ray tracing. It is that the PS5 essentially deleted loading screens, and it did so on purpose, as the central design goal of the entire machine.

Cerny's 0.8-second fast travel

When PlayStation lead architect Mark Cerny gave his “Road to PS5” technical talk in March 2020, the demo everyone remembers was a side-by-side of fast travel in Marvel's Spider-Man: roughly 15 seconds on a PS4 Pro versus 0.8 seconds on PS5. That is not an incremental improvement; that is a category change, an almost twentyfold collapse. Cerny's framing was deliberate and worth quoting in full: “The primary reason for an ultra-high-speed SSD is that it gives the game designer freedom.” And the number that made engineers sit up: “You can load 2 GB of content in a quarter of a second.”

What 5.5 GB/s actually buys

The PS5's SSD moves data at a raw 5.5 GB/s. The PS4's hard drive manages somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 MB/s — a difference of roughly fifty to a hundred times, before you even count the PS5's dedicated decompression hardware. In practice this means games boot in seconds, fast travel is near-instant, and — critically — designers no longer have to hide loading behind slow elevators, crawl-through gaps, and “press X to squeeze between the rocks.” Those design crutches existed to buy the hard drive time. Remove the hard drive and they vanish. That is why the SSD “gives the game designer freedom”: it is not just faster, it retires a whole vocabulary of workarounds.

The caveat nobody markets

Here is the honest counterweight, and it comes straight from tech reviewer Austin Evans' 2026 revisit of the PS4: outside of load times, the visual gulf is smaller than the TFLOPS gap implies. His verdict on cross-gen titles was that the PS5 loads faster and runs smoother, but that there is “no dramatic difference” in how the games actually look sitting on your couch. Lower-resolution textures, shorter draw distance, and simpler lighting on the PS4 versions — yes. A generational chasm you notice from ten feet away — frequently no. The SSD is the difference you feel every single time you sit down. The graphics are the difference you have to go looking for.

Performance: 4K120 vs 1080p60

Specs are potential. This section is about what the two machines actually deliver when a real game is running, which is a messier and more honest picture than any bar chart.

Resolution and frame-rate ceilings

Back Market's 2026 buyer comparison frames the divide cleanly: the PS5 supports up to 4K resolution and up to 120 fps, while the PS4 is a 1080p-class machine with lower frame-rate targets. What Hi-Fi's consumer-facing summary puts the same gap in shorthand — 16 GB versus 8 GB of memory and 120 fps versus 60 fps of headroom — and calls the PS5 the more future-facing machine on that basis. Both framings are correct and both are ceilings, not guarantees: a given game hits 120 fps only if the developer built a performance mode for it, and plenty of PS5 showpieces cap at 4K/30 or 4K/60 by choice.

Cross-gen games, side by side

The most useful test in 2026 is a game that ships on both consoles, and there are still many. Per the 2026 discussion around Evans' PS4 revisit, late-generation cross-gen titles on PS4 often target 60 fps but fluctuate down into the 40–50 fps range in demanding scenes, while the PS5 sustains 60 fps or higher far more reliably. That is the Jaguar CPU tax made visible. The same game, on the same evening, feels composed on the PS5 and slightly seasick on the PS4 — not because the pixels are prettier, but because the frame pacing holds. This is also the generation where cross-gen support finally starts to end: the marquee titles that define 2026, like the PS5-and-Xbox-only launch of Grand Theft Auto VI at its much-discussed $79.99, simply do not have a PS4 version. That is the hard wall the older console eventually hits.

Ray tracing, the DualSense, and Tempest 3D

Three PS5 features have no PS4 equivalent at all. Hardware ray tracing produces genuinely better reflections and lighting where a game supports it. Tempest 3D audio gives a convincing sense of positional sound through ordinary headphones. And the DualSense controller — with its haptic feedback and resistive adaptive triggers — is the one PS5 upgrade that is impossible to appreciate from a spec sheet and obvious within thirty seconds of holding it. Sony's own pack-in, Astro's Playroom, exists largely to demonstrate it. The DualShock 4 was a fine pad; the DualSense is the rare controller that changes how a game feels rather than just how it looks. If you want the tier above even this — machine-learning upscaling via PSSR — that is PS5 Pro territory, and we covered the enhanced PSSR update that hit 50-plus games for free separately.

Backward Compatibility & Migration

This is the feature that quietly reframes the entire comparison. The PS5 is not a clean break from the PS4; it is a migration path, and that is by design.

99% of the PS4 library, in one box

Per PlayStation's official support documentation, the overwhelming majority — more than 99% of the 4,000-plus PS4 games — are playable on PS5. What Hi-Fi's upgrade guide makes the flip-side point almost as strongly for anyone weighing whether to bother: “there are almost no titles in its entire catalogue that can't also be played on PS4.” Read those two sentences together and you get the real state of play in 2026: for the shared library, the console you own barely gates what you can play. It gates how well it runs.

Game Boost and the 30-fps unlock

The PS5 does more than merely run PS4 games — it frequently runs them better, for free, through a feature called Game Boost. Digital Foundry tested this exhaustively and titled their verdict, with uncharacteristic enthusiasm, “PlayStation 5 Backwards Compatibility Tested — And It's Fantastic!” Games that were capped at 30 fps on PS4 hardware often hold a locked 60 on PS5; games that stuttered now hold their target. It is not universal — Bloodborne, famously, is hard-locked to 30 fps and needs an actual patch rather than a boost — but as a general rule, your PS4 library gets a quiet, unbilled upgrade the day you migrate.

What does not carry over

Two honest limitations. First, the PS5 has no native disc backward compatibility for PS3, PS2, or PS1 — it goes back exactly one generation and no further. If your shelf is full of older discs, the PS5 will not read them. Second, and this trips people up constantly: the PS5 Digital Edition cannot play any disc, including the PS4 discs you already own. If you have a physical PS4 library you intend to keep using, you need a disc-drive PS5, full stop. That single fact is worth $50 of the price difference to the right buyer.

Pricing in 2026: Older, Yet Pricier

Now the genuinely strange part, and the reason this comparison reads differently in 2026 than it did in 2021. Consoles are supposed to get cheaper as they age. The PS5 did the opposite.

The April 2026 hike

On March 27, 2026, Sony announced a global price increase, effective April 2. The disc PS5 rose to $649.99, the Digital Edition to $599.99, and the PS5 Pro to an eye-watering $899.99; the PlayStation Portal remote player went from $199.99 to $249.99. Sony's VP of Global Marketing, Isabelle Tomatis, gave the official reason 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.” CNBC reported the hikes ran “up to $150” and traced them to those same “pressures in the global economy,” while GameSpot's coverage pinned the underlying drivers: an AI-driven memory-chip shortage that pushed DRAM spot prices up sharply, plus new semiconductor tariffs. The upshot is a machine that launched at $399.99 in its digital form and now costs $599.99 — a $200 climb over its own lifetime.

Used and refurbished PS4

Against that backdrop, the PS4's used-market pricing looks less like a bargain and more like an act of protest. Evans' 2026 revisit cites working used systems at roughly $70–$100 in the US. In Europe, refurbisher Back Market listed a PS4 at around €205 against a PS5 at €549 as of June 2026. Whichever market you shop, the ratio is the story: you can buy three or four used PS4s for the price of one new disc PS5, and each of them plays the same enormous shared library. For a huge number of buyers, that math is the entire decision.

Digital vs disc, and the second-hand trap

One planning note that the price gap makes urgent. The $50 premium for the disc PS5 over the Digital Edition is not really about 4K Blu-ray movies. It is about physical games — buying them used, selling them on, lending them, and crucially, playing the PS4 discs you already own. In a generation where the console itself keeps getting pricier, the ability to buy a game second-hand for $15 instead of $70 is a hedge worth having. The Digital Edition saves you $50 today and quietly forecloses every discount for the rest of the console's life. Choose deliberately.

The Sales Paradox: Faster, Still Outsold

We promised you a paradox, and the sales data delivers it with a straight face. The most powerful, most feature-complete PlayStation ever made is, by the raw unit count, losing to the machine it replaced.

Lifetime: 117 million vs 92 million

According to VGChartz's May 2026 tracking, the PS4 has sold 117.20 million units lifetime, while the PS5, in month 67 of its life, sits at 92.34 million. That leaves the newer console 24.86 million units behind its predecessor's lifetime total — a gap larger than the entire install base of most consoles in history. The PS4 remains the second-best-selling home console ever made, behind only the PS2, and the PS5 has not yet caught it despite having 5.6 times the graphics power and half a decade on the market.

The aligned month-for-month race

Now, the fair objection: the PS4 has simply had more years to sell. So VGChartz also runs an aligned comparison — each console measured at the same number of months since launch — and even that does not rescue the PS5. Measured over an identical 67-month window, the PS4 had sold 96.46 million to the PS5's 92.34 million. Rewind to the January 2026 snapshot and the aligned figures were PS4 at roughly 92.79 million versus PS5 at 90.20 million, with the older console ahead by about 2.59 million at the equivalent age. (If you have seen that 92.79 million figure quoted as the PS4's “lifetime” total, it is not — it is the aligned same-age number; the real lifetime figure is the 117.20 million above.) Most damning of all: over the trailing twelve months, VGChartz has the PS4 still outselling the PS5 by around 638,000 units. Six years in, the last-gen box is still moving faster than its successor.

Why the PS4 stayed ahead

The explanation is not mysterious once you stop treating the PS5 as a pure upgrade. Three forces keep the PS4 selling. First, price: a $70 used console beats a $600 new one for a colossal share of the market, and the 2026 hikes only widened that moat. Second, the shared library: because nearly everything plays on both, the PS4 never became obsolete for the games people actually buy — Fortnite, Call of Duty, sports franchises — and PS4 owners kept playing online right alongside PS5 owners. Third, supply and economics: for stretches of its life the PS5 was hard to find and, later, expensive to justify. The result is regional as much as global — in the US, per VGChartz's June 2026 regional data, the PS5 was 5.11 million behind the PS4's lifetime pace, and in Japan roughly 2.05 million behind. The PS5 is winning the argument about which machine is better. It has not yet won the argument about which machine people buy.

6 Real-World Scenarios

Enough abstraction. Here is who each console is actually for, in the specific terms of 2026.

The budget buyer and the first-console household

1. The first-time or budget buyer. You have never owned a PlayStation, or you are replacing a dead one on a tight budget. A used PS4 at $70–$100 gives you access to one of the deepest game libraries ever assembled at a price that rounds to “free” next to a new PS5. This is Evans' “best deal in gaming,” and for pure cost-per-hour-of-fun, nothing else in the console space is close. 2. The first-console-for-a-kid household. The child who will drop it, spill on it, and leave it running for eleven hours does not need a $650 machine. A cheap, rugged, disc-based PS4 with a stack of $10 used games is the rational parental purchase, and the online multiplayer still works with their friends on PS5.

The performance household and the cinematic gamer

3. The 4K performance household. You own a good 4K TV, ideally one that does 120 Hz, and you care about it. The PS5's 4K/120 ceiling, ray tracing, and locked 60-fps modes are the entire reason you bought that panel; the PS4 leaves it half-used. 4. The single-player cinematic gamer. You play the big, showpiece narrative games, and increasingly those are PS5-only — the generation's marquee exclusives and cross-platform giants alike now skip the PS4 entirely. If your want-list includes the titles that define 2026, the PS5 is not optional, it is the price of entry.

The multiplayer family and the lapsed owner

5. The multiplayer / cross-play family. Your household plays Fortnite, Call of Duty, and sports games together, and not everyone needs the same box. A mixed setup — one PS5, one or two cheap PS4s — works, because those games remain supported on PS4 and play online with PS5 users. The older consoles are, functionally, budget seats at the same table. 6. The lapsed owner with a PS4 library. You already own a PS4 and a shelf of games, and you have drifted away. Upgrading to a disc PS5 is the highest-return path: 99% of your existing library comes with you, most of it running better via Game Boost, and you lose nothing except the loading screens. Just remember — disc model, not Digital, or those old discs become coasters.

How to Move From PS4 to PS5

If you have decided to upgrade, do it in the right order and you will lose nothing. Do it in the wrong order and you will spend an evening re-downloading 400 GB you did not need to. Here is the clean path.

1. Update both consoles to the latest firmware. Data transfer and cloud saves both misbehave across mismatched system-software versions. Get both current first.
2. Sign in with the same PSN account on the PS5. Your entire digital library is tied to the account, not the hardware. Everything you have ever bought digitally reappears in your library, ready to re-download at no cost.
3. Use a wired LAN transfer for the bulk move. On the PS5, go to Settings > System > System Software > Data Transfer and connect the two consoles with an Ethernet cable. This pulls games, saves, screenshots, and settings across far faster than Wi-Fi or re-downloading.
4. Handle saves deliberately. PlayStation Plus cloud storage is the cleanest route; a USB drive works too if you copy from the PS4 first. Note that some games do not auto-upgrade a PS4 save into their PS5 version — that step is often a manual “upload/download” inside the game's own menu.
5. For disc games, insert the disc. A disc-model PS5 unlocks each PS4 game when the disc is in the drive, exactly as before. A Digital Edition cannot do this at all — if you own physical games, this is your reminder that you needed the disc model.
6. Trigger the per-game upgrade for cross-gen titles. Many games have a distinct, enhanced PS5 version. Look for an “Upgrade” or “PS5 version” option on the game's hub; installing the PS4 build and never claiming the upgrade is the most common migration mistake.

Fastest, least-painful PS4 -> PS5 move:

  1. Update BOTH consoles to the latest firmware
  2. Same PSN account on both  ->  digital library re-downloads free
  3. Wired LAN transfer:  Settings > System > Data Transfer
  4. Saves:  PS Plus cloud  OR  USB drive (copy from PS4 first)
  5. Disc games:  need a DISC PS5 - the Digital Edition reads nothing
  6. Cross-gen titles:  claim the “Upgrade” IN the game's menu

The gotchas worth repeating

Three things bite people. The Digital Edition plays no discs, period. A handful of PS4 games are not backward compatible, and a few (hello again, Bloodborne) are locked to 30 fps until patched. And your PlayStation Plus subscription carries over automatically — but the tier you need for cloud saves is Essential or higher, so confirm before you rely on the cloud for your only backup.

Pros, Cons & The Final Word

Two tables, then the ruling. No hedging.

PS5 pros and cons

PS4 pros and cons

The Machine's final ruling

Here is the verdict, backed by every number above. If you are buying one console to be your main machine for the next several years, buy the disc PS5. It is 5.6 times the GPU, a Zen 2 CPU that actually holds 60 fps, an SSD that changed how games are built, the DualSense, and — decisively — the only platform where this generation's important games now ship. The PS4's service clock is running down: online tournament features already went dark in late 2025, and new first-party support tapers off around 2027. You would be buying into a sunset.

But if you are buying a second console, a first console for a kid, or you simply refuse to pay $600-plus for a video game machine, the PS4 at $70–$100 is the most defensible purchase in the hobby. The sales data is not an accident or a fluke — the PS4 has outsold the PS5 by nearly 25 million units lifetime, and it was still outselling it month-for-month deep into 2026, precisely because that value proposition is real. Push Square is right that the PS5 “smokes its predecessor in every category.” Evans is also right that the PS4 remains “a functional and affordable gaming device.” Both statements are true at once, and holding them together is the whole point of this comparison.

What you should not do is buy a PS5 as a stopgap while you wait for the next thing — the PS6 is not arriving until 2028 at the earliest, so the PS5 has years of relevance ahead of it and is a safe long-term buy. And if you are cross-shopping the wider hardware market rather than just Sony's two boxes, the field is busier than it used to be — the Xbox handheld that launched in October 2025 is a different pitch entirely. But between these two specific machines, the answer is simple: the PS5 is the better console, the PS4 is the better deal, and in 2026 those are two different questions with two different right answers.