11 ways to supercharge your games on your PS5

Playing games on your PlayStation 5 is, of course, much more exciting than digging through menus and settings options, but if you spend a little time getting these settings right, you’ll reap the benefits in your game.

From avoiding spoilers to controlling notifications to enabling all the graphical enhancements your PS5 has to offer, there’s a lot to dig into here. All of these options can be found through Settings. Just start by selecting the gear icon in the top right corner of the PS5 home screen.

If you want to maximize the amount of time you get between recharges from the DualSense Wireless Controller, you can have it automatically power off after a certain amount of inactivity.

• Choose System > Power saving > Set time until controllers turn off
• Take your pick: 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or 60 minutes. The default setting is for the controllers not to shutdown at all.

You have a choice on the PS5: performance mode or resolution mode. The former means that a game will have higher frame rates, while the latter pushes the graphics quality to the maximum possible.

In other words, games tend to look better in resolution mode because all the visual flourishes are turned on. In performance mode, games tend to look smoother because more frames can be rendered in a faster time without all those enhancements. The differences will vary from game to game, depending on their complexity.

• To choose between the two modes, go to Game/Application Saved Data and Settings > Game Presets > Performance Mode or Resolution Mode.
• You can also let each individual game choose for itself with the game default option.

When you capture screenshots and gameplay clips on your PS5, you have a choice when it comes to the quality in which these images and videos are saved.

• Go to Captures and broadcasts > Captures.
• Gonna screenshot format and video clip format to set the resolution, file type, and HDR settings for screenshots and video clips.
• If you stream games online, the settings for this can be set via transmissions.

You don’t want too many notifications distracting you while you’re on your PS5, especially if you’re busy trying to beat that elusive boss or set a new high score.

If you go to Settings and choose notifications, you can change how long pop-up notifications appear and whether or not they are accompanied by a sound and a brief preview of their content. You can also turn off push notifications entirely if you want.

Further down the same screen are options to configure which events trigger a notification and which don’t, from messages to downloads. In each case, you can hide the alerts during videos, broadcasts, or games.

It’s hard to fully guard against spoilers, but your PS5 can help when it comes to gaming.

• Go to Game/Application Save Data and Settings > Spoiler Warnings.
• You can now turn on warnings, which will appear whenever someone tries to share a screenshot of game activity with you that you haven’t taken yet.
• Game developers can also flag screenshots as potentially spoilers.

You do not need to accept the default settings of the DualSense wireless controller that is supplied to you from the factory.

• Gonna Accessories > Controller (General).
• Here you can set the intensity of the wake and vibrate effect, the hold delay, the volume of the controller speaker, and the brightness of the controller indicators.

It’s important to review the privacy settings of each device you own, and the PlayStation 5 is no different. While in Settings:

• Open Users and Accounts > Privacyand you can limit some of the data sent to Sony, turn off targeted advertising, and more.
• Select View and customize your privacy settingsand there are options to make yourself less visible to other people through the PlayStation platform: for example, you can set who can find you in search results and send you friend requests.
• On that same page, you can block other people from seeing your online status, the game you’re currently playing, and your game history. Nobody, Just friends, Friends of friendseither Someone.

Sony has been testing a voice command feature for the PS5 in the US and UK. Although it is still in previewit means that you can perform certain actions (such as launching games and controlling media playback) with your voice.

• To enable the feature, go to Voice command (preview).
• The trigger phrase you need is “Hello PlayStation”, and you can also configure settings like the speed and volume of the speech you receive from your console.
• Most of the voice commands you’ll need are obvious, like “Pause” or “Open…” followed by the name of a particular game. Sony has more information on this new feature and how it works. here.

Your PS5 can automatically adjust the refresh rate of games for the smoothest performance possible, as long as you have it connected to a TV that supports the feature (check its specs list to see).

• Variable Refresh Rate, or VRR, can be enabled from Display and video > Video output > VRR.
• You can also enable it for games that don’t explicitly support the feature (results may vary in quality).

Many games give you a choice when it comes to how difficult the experience of working through the game really is, and there’s a master setting for this in the PS5 menus.

• Open Game/Application Saved Data and Settings > Game Presets > Difficulty.
• Now you can choose between easier, Easy, Normal, Hard, more difficult either game default.

You can still make adjustments within individual games, but this will set a default value so you can start playing at your preferred difficulty level more quickly. However, it will only work on titles that are aware of and support this PS5 feature.

If you’re having trouble reading everything on the PS5 interface, you can change the size and style of the on-screen text.

• Select Accessibility > Display > Text size to see the options.
• Just below is a bold text settings that you can also use.

Note that the games should follow the same settings, so the text should also be easier to read in your games.