13 Things You Never Knew Your PlayStation 5 Could Actually Do – BGR

There are more reasons than ever to grab a PlayStation 5 instead of an Xbox console in 2026, despite Microsoft’s massive acquisitions of both Activision Blizzard and Bethesda. Sony’s focus on quality exclusives and high sales has helped establish PlayStation’s dominance in the current console market. While some have questioned Sony’s approach — specifically its lack of new IPs and its controversial closures of multiple beloved studios — that hasn’t stopped the PS5 from finding a home in millions of living rooms. Even with scalpers causing mass console shortages back when the console launched in 2020, scarcity never stopped people from getting their hands on the PS5 as soon as they could to enjoy the latest AAA games on the market.

The PS5 isn’t just great for its game selection. It also comes with several perks that you may not have taken advantage of yet, as well as others that you likely had no clue existed. Even those who have owned the console since launch may not be aware of just how feature-rich the PS5 is. Once you uncover its many underrated and hidden settings, you’ll love the PS5 even more than you (hopefully) already do. The PS5’s unique feature set really cements it as a console that gives gamers all the tools they’d ever need to personalize their gaming experience. You may have to deal with some common PlayStation 5 problems in the process, but even if you do, the trouble is more than worth it.

Backwards compatibility is an oft-coveted console feature, which is why it was so disappointing that Sony dropped it for the PS4. Thankfully, the PS5 delighted its fanbase by reintroducing backwards compatibility and letting people play PS4 games on the PS5. As neat as that was, Sony went the extra mile and decided to add something new to make the PS5 the best platform for both current- and previous-gen titles: Game Boost. This technology allows PS4 games to leverage the PS5’s upgraded hardware so they can run better than they ever did before.

Using Game Boost, many PS4 titles can enjoy improved frame rates and higher graphical fidelity on the PS5. This, coupled with the swift loading times afforded by the PS5’s SSD, makes using this console a no-brainer if you’re looking to enjoy games from both the eighth and ninth generations of game consoles. Some of the many titles that benefit from Game Boost include God of War, Ratchet & Clank, Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, The Last of Us Part II, and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

It’s a shame that so many people have had trouble with Remote Play, with some even dismissing it as a gimmick. Sony hasn’t done much to help improve its image, though; the underwhelming PlayStation Portal gives people even more ammunition to dunk on Remote Play and its perceived instability. It’s true that slow network speeds can make games downright unplayable using Remote Play, but people do tend to underestimate just how slow their Wi-Fi connections are. As long as you don’t mind some minor input lag — which shouldn’t be a major issue for games without real-time action gameplay or time-sensitive elements — Remote Play can be a great way to enhance how (and where) you play PS5 games.

The PlayStation Portal is certainly not for everyone, but luckily, you don’t need it to be able to enjoy Remote Play. With the PS Remote Play app, you can game on your phone, laptop, PC, Mac, and even your tablet. If you’ve splurged on the best internet plan your ISP offers, give Remote Play a shot if you don’t already use it. You might be pleasantly surprised by how responsive it can be. In fact, there’s another hidden perk of using Remote Play that would interest many PlayStation owners, but we’ll get to that later.

When players first got their hands on it, the DualSense controller felt undeniably next gen. Sony is no stranger to being accused of launching gimmicky products and features, but DualSense’s adaptive triggers and haptic feedback features can truly elevate the player experience. The controller’s trigger resistance and haptic effects for things like gunfire boost immersion, as do the controller’s localized vibrations that let you feel the pitter-patter of rain or the textures of different surfaces you drive on. It’s no wonder that so many people consider the PS5 DualSense controller to be the best gaming controller on the market.

Since so many PS5 games took advantage of DualSense’s immersive potential, it followed that DualShock 4 controllers would be incompatible with PS5 games. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use DualShock 4 controllers with your PlayStation 5 at all. If you’re playing PS4 games on the PS5, then you can connect either a DualShock 4 or a DualSense controller to play them. It’s a nice touch that makes your old DualShock 4 controllers worth holding onto, especially if you’ve missed out on some quality eighth-gen games. The real kicker, though, is that you can use a DualShock 4 controller to play PS5 games if you’re playing them via Remote Play. Just connect your DualShock 4 to a compatible device that can also run the PS Remote Play app, and voilà — you’ve just uncovered a unique workaround that makes your PS4 controllers even more useful than you thought.

Those who use voice chat in multiplayer games know how practical the mute button can be. A single button press on the DualSense controller is enough to mute both your microphone and speaker, saving you the embarrassment of any personal conversations broadcasting on voice chat. One thing you might not be aware of is that muting the controller strengthens DualSense haptics and adaptive triggers alike, provided the controller’s vibration settings are already set to Strong.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that the DualSense controller’s mute button has the sole purpose of — well — muting you. But there’s more to this button than meets the eye. If you hold the mute button on your DualSense controller, the PS5 takes things a step further by muting all its system audio completely. So, when your TV remote isn’t nearby and you need to turn your game volume down quickly, this trick can be quite useful.

It’s not uncommon for serious gamers to do a deep dive into the settings menu for every game they play. Most console games have relatively simple settings and are already optimized for the hardware they’ve been ported to, so you shouldn’t have to dig around many in-game menus for PlayStation 5 games. But there are still settings related to difficulty, graphical fidelity, camera sensitivity, subtitles, and game language that plenty of players would want to alter. As much as you might enjoy customization options, if you’d rather avoid having to navigate to the settings menu for every game you play just to change the same three things, the PS5 has afforded you a way to do that — and if you didn’t already know about it, the inner nerd in you might be impressed by how effective and user-friendly this one bit of software engineering is.

To avoid menu scrolling as much as possible, you can use Game Presets, one of the PS5’s most underrated features. From the Settings tab on your PS5, navigate to Saved Data and Game/App Settings. From here, go to Game Presets, and you’ll find a suite of options that will be universally applied to almost every PS5 game. It’s a surprisingly convenient quality-of-life feature that can make your gaming activities slightly less cumbersome.

Once you start getting into the Sony PlayStation ecosystem, you’ll praise the lengths Sony has gone to make console gaming a simple pick-up-and-play endeavor. Take PlayStation App — at a glance, the app just seems like a nice way to respond to messages, browse the PS Store, and purchase games that catch your eye. However, one of PlayStation App’s handiest functions is one that isn’t very obvious.

Most users are accustomed to installing games manually, whether they’ve purchased them directly or got them as part of their PS Plus subscription. Bur you can also remotely download games via PlayStation App while the PS5 is in rest mode. You’ll need to pair your console to PlayStation App first, of course. Once that’s done, go to the Purchased section of your Game Library page in the app, then select the game you want to download to your console. Your PlayStation 5 will boot up for a split second, initiate the download, then return to Rest Mode. This feature may seem small, but it’s an added level of convenience that’s much appreciated — especially when you’re already in bed and you forgot to install a massive game that you were hoping to play the following morning.

Ever since the PS3 graced us with its overpriced yet ahead-of-its-time hardware, Sony fans were introduced to a startup beep sound that’s since become an iconic staple of its console offerings. The startup sound is a simple high-pitched audio cue signifying that your console is ready and raring to go. Some people pay no attention to this beep, but others find it annoying, especially when they’re trying to sneak in an hour or two of gaming time without waking up anyone nearby.

After seventeen years of fans being unable to adjust the PlayStation’s startup noise, Sony finally addressed the issue in a software update released at the end of July 2023. That’s right — they finally added an option to turn off the startup sound. To toggle the option to mute the startup beep, go to the System menu from Settings, then select Beep and Light. From there, you can select the Mute Beep Sound option, which does precisely what you’d expect. If you just want the beep to be subtler, though, you can switch your startup beep volume from High (the standard option) to either Medium or Low in the Volume setting under Beep and Light.

The AAA industry continuously evolves in the ways of cutting-edge graphics and content volume, but that comes at a major cost. High-resolution assets can take up a lot of space, and it doesn’t help that AAA games tend to throw optimization out the window, which is why games like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor have a considerable file size of 147GB. To put that into context, a base PS5 with an 825GB SSD — out of which only 667GB is usable — can only house four copies of Star Wars Jedi: Survivors before storage space hits critically low levels. Plus, it’s unlikely that you won’t have a few games installed on your PS5 already before you download an AAA game that takes up more than 100GB of storage. In such situations, you’re forced to delete a game or two from your PS5.

If you don’t want to be restrained by limited storage space all the time, a cheap and easy way to upgrade your PlayStation 5 is to install a compatible M.2 SSD. Doing this can increase your PS5’s capacity by up to 8TB, in which case you’d be able to download dozens (or even hundreds) of titles without worrying about storage constraints. You can also store games on an external hard drive that you can connect to the PS5’s USB port if you want to save on space without having to delete game files outright. Keep in mind that you can only play PS4 games directly from an external HDD or SSD. If you want to play a PS5 game, you must transfer it to the console’s internal storage first.

We’ve already talked at length about how immersive the DualSense’s haptic feedback and adaptive triggers are. As great as the tech is, not everyone wants their controller’s haptics to be working at full strength all the time. Some people prefer using a controller without feeling any jolts or vibrations, while others may be concerned with possible wear from prolonged adaptive trigger use. In both instances, the option to soften or disable DualSense controller haptics is much welcome.

Navigate to the Accessories tab from your PS5’s Settings menu. From there, select Controller (General) to configure both Vibration Intensity and Trigger Effect Intensity. You can either turn them off altogether or choose between Weak, Medium, or Strong settings. If you have the DualSense Edge, you can adjust these settings for multiple controller profiles. Since you can map up to three profile shortcuts on the DualSense Edge, it’s easy to increase or decrease DualSense haptic intensity on the fly.

Audio plays a huge part in enhancing the immersion of your favorite PS5 games, and Sony went above and beyond to ensure the music and sound in games can envelop the player and the space they’re gaming in. This was achieved by integrating Tempest 3D audio technology, which enables a surround sound effect similar to Dolby Atmos. Just like most surround sound tech, you should adjust 3D audio in your PS5’s settings if you want to optimize how sound is projected from your chosen audio output device.

Setting up 3D audio is pretty simple. Choose the relevant option from the Sound tab in the PS5’s Settings menu, and the console will then give you on-screen instructions to map out your living room space to optimize audio output. If you’re using headphones, you can choose between five audio presets to easily enjoy 3D audio. In a beta update from July 2024, Sony added an option that lets you set up a custom 3D audio profile. The feature leads you through a simple setup process; once complete, you can utilize a personalized audio profile that works perfectly with your headset. The best part is that this feature isn’t exclusive to Sony’s own PULSE Elite wireless headset — any headphone that supports 3D audio will work properly with this feature enabled.

Once people collectively got over the PS5’s polarizing look, they eventually grew to admire the console’s in-your-face design. It looks futuristic and sleek while having an identity of its own, with the power indicator light bar adding to its modern flair. The light bar is a visual indicator of the PS5’s current status. On startup, the light is blue before transitioning to a crisp white color to indicate that the console is powered on. When you put the console in rest mode, the light switches to a muted orange color.

It wasn’t always possible for players to adjust the brightness of the light strip, but Sony added that feature in Update 9.00, which rolled out in March 2024. It was placed in the same menu as the option to adjust or mute the PS5’s startup sound; players can access both settings by navigating to the System tab from Settings, then selecting Beep and Light. There, you’ll see a Brightness option for the power indicator. You can’t turn it off altogether, but you can choose between Dim, Medium, or Bright to adjust its intensity.

Spoilers can have nightmarish effects on a fanbase. If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, the mere mention of the word “spoiler” may give you unwelcome flashbacks to the time when Season 8 was so popular that avoiding key plot points became nearly impossible. Video game spoilers are no exception, with The Last of Us Part II becoming a notorious case study of how a leaked script and a major early-game spoiler led to one of the most ruthless fan backlashes in video game history. If you’re working through a PS5 game with hours and hours of story content, one of the last things you’d want is to see a screenshot or a gameplay clip that spoils a plot point you haven’t reached yet. This is where a helpful console setting can shield you.

Go to the Saved Data and Game/App Settings tab and navigate to the Spoiler Warnings page, where you can enable a setting called Warn About Game Spoilers. With this feature, players can choose between “Only Spoilers Identified by Game Developers” or “Everything You Haven’t Seen Yet”. The former option hides any content developers have flagged as possible spoilers, while the latter hides content related to titles you haven’t yet played. This feature does only work for PS5 games, however, so you’ll still need to be wary of avoiding spoilers for previous-gen games without any console assists.

Folders are crucial for organizing files, and those who are particular about categorization can easily spend countless hours making folders to clean up clutter on their digital systems. Why should the PlayStation 5 be exempt? Well, before September 2022, there was no viable way to organize games in your library. Thankfully, a firmware update introduced Gamelists, which are folders that make organizing and labelling your purchased games as easy as can be.

To form a Gamelist, navigate to Your Collection in the PS5’s Game Library. Select Create Gamelist, and the console will prompt you to create a folder that you can name and populate with the games you wish to add. Before you go berserk with the feature, keep in mind that you can only have a total of 15 Gamelists. Users have also discovered that each Gamelist has a 100-game limit. As long as you’re fine with those restrictions, though, you should face no problems when organizing your PS5 library.