PS5 download speeds are set to be significantly faster than PS4 over the same internet connection, according to reports from reviewers today. Which might be nice if you were hoping to download some of the PS5 launch games after your console is delivered.
The PS4 is somewhat notorious for taking quite a while to download large games from the console's digital storefront and patch delivery backbone, PSN. But Sony appear to fixed some of the bottlenecks that caused this crawl, even on high-speed connections, as the PS5 can download games much, much faster than its predecessors.
In USGamer's review of the PS5, Mike Williams notes that games downloaded to the PlayStation 5 were up to eight times faster to complete transfer than the same game on the PS4 Pro. A smaller game (Disgaea 5 in Mike's case) completed the 6.58GB download in 10 minutes and 42 seconds on the PS4 Pro, but that time was slashed down by more than 80% to 1 minute and 58 seconds on PS5.
For larger games (Mike's example was Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise) the PS4 Pro took its usual 58 minutes and 34 seconds to download 36.6GB, whereas the PS5 completed that in just 7 minutes and 1 second. That is a huge improvement. Mike says both were tested on a wired ethernet connection over a network clocked at 756Mbps down and 939 Mbps up, so pretty much the best consumer line you could get. But hopefully that means every connection is set to see improvements this generation.
The reason for the PS4's download woes has been discussed by many of the net's brightest for years now, but ultimately boils down to the console telling Sony's Content Delivery Network (CDN) servers that it has a smaller receive window (amount of data that can be sent in a single packet) than it should.
Getting rid of that restriction, and aided by a much faster write-speed to an SSD drive, would likely account for these monolithic gains in download speed on the PS5. It's a welcome change to a problem that has seen Sony introduce measures such as pre-loading Call of Duty patches to try and negate the hours-long wait for 100GB+ downloads on the day.
Are you excited for PS5 download speeds to end your struggles with waiting to download and play Bloodborne again? Or do some of the PS5 launch games excite you more?
