A new leak from YouTuber Moore’s Law Is Dead (MLID) claims the PlayStation 6 will be backward compatible with both PS4 and PS5 games. The information reportedly comes from an internal Sony document shared with AMD, dating back to 2023.
This was discussed on the April 14 episode of the Broken Silicon Podcast. MLID stated directly: “The PS6, yes, it has backwards compatibility to 4 and 5, and they explicitly say it all over the place.”
MLID also noted the document is “years old,” which means Sony’s plans could have changed in the time since.
What the Leaked Document Says
The leaked Sony document covers both the PS6 home console, codenamed Orion, and the companion handheld, codenamed Canis. Both are confirmed in the document as backward compatible with PS5 and PS4 games, though PS3 is not mentioned.
A section of the document was shown on the podcast, with the leaker noting it “literally says ‘back compat PS4, PS5’ right there.”
If accurate, the PS6 would be the first Sony console to offer backward compatibility spanning two previous generations. The PS5 was the first PlayStation to include backward compatibility at all, covering PS4 games.
PS6 Handheld: Project Canis
The handheld side of this story is where things get interesting. The Canis handheld is not a PS5 derivative. It is being positioned as a core PS6 product, designed to play PS4, PS5, and PS6 titles, with 1080p and 720p performance modes.
The Canis APU includes hardware support for ray tracing, meaning games that cannot disable ray tracing will still run on the device.
Because the PS6 handheld is unlikely to have a disc drive, backward compatibility will apply to digital game libraries only. Physical PS4 and PS5 discs would not work on the handheld.
The leaked Canis specs, per MLID, include a monolithic 3nm die, 4 Zen 6c CPU cores, 12 to 20 RDNA 5 compute units running at 1.6 to 2GHz, a 128-bit bus with LPDDR5X-7500 memory, a MicroSD slot, an M.2 SSD slot, haptic vibration, dual microphones, a touchscreen, and USB-C video output.
PS6 Home Console: Project Orion
On the home console side, the PS6 Orion is described in the leak as a chiplet design using 8 Zen 6 CPU cores, 40 to 48 RDNA 5 compute units running above 3GHz, and a GDDR7 memory bus. Rasterization performance is estimated at around three times that of the PS5, with ray tracing expected to scale higher.
Manufacturing for both devices is reportedly planned for mid-2027, with a launch window of fall 2027 or early 2028.
