Good news for PS5 owners: Compression is shrinking game installs

With just 667GB of usable space, the PS5's SSD is premium real estate. But there's some good news for PS5 owners: Specific games are now becoming smaller compared to other platforms due to powerful compressing tech.

Control Ultimate Edition is one of the first games to flex the PS5's new Kraken compression tech. The game clocks in just 25GB on PS5 with 4K resolution textures and PS5 optimizations intact, a 42% reduction from the Series X/S file size of 42GB. This isn't a big reduction from the PS4 version, though, which only clocks in at 24GB.

It's worth noting the two consoles use different compression systems. PS5 uses RAD Game Tools' new Oodle Kraken, which massively improves data compression. This new toolset synergizes with the PS5's new highly customized PCIe 4.0 SSD and 12-channel memory controller that enables compressed data speeds of up to 9GB/sec.

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The Xbox Series X/S, on the other hand, uses a proprietary BCPack compression system. Not a whole lot is known about BCPack, but we do know it's a codec specifically optimized for texture compression.

Sadly, the Series X/S SSD doesn't feature blazing-fast speeds and uses a drive with a custom ASIC to hit PCIe Gen3x4 (PCIe Gen 4x2) perf of up to 4.8GB/sec compressed data speeds.