10 Hacks Every PS5 Gamer Should Know

How to mute the PS5 beep on startup, get help with your games, disable the trigger haptics, and more.

Sony’s PlayStation 5 is a powerful machine, but if you just plugged it right into your TV and never bothered to go into the settings, there’s a chance you’re not seeing its full potential. From enabling 120 fps gameplay to customizing your Welcome hub, there’s a lot you can do with the PS5, if you’re willing to tinker a little bit. Here are the 10 best tips and tricks to getting the most out of Sony’s current gaming console.

Enable 120Hz and 4K on your PS5

Just because you bought a fancy new PS5 doesn’t automatically mean you’re getting the best performance out of it possible. If you have a 4K TV or a monitor that can support a 120Hz refresh rate or above, you’ll want to double check your video output settings to ensure your console is taking advantage of it.

First, before even turning on your device, make sure it’s connected via an HDMI 2.1 cable. This is necessary for frame rates above 60 at 4K. Your PS5 should have come with one, and you’ll know if it’s the right one if it has a boxy rectangle on either side of the cable. Also ensure that you’re plugging your cable into a port that can accept HDMI 2.1, which will look different based on your screen. On my LG C1 TV, this port says “4K @ 120Hz” above it.

Next, while your console may detect what your screen can handle and adjust its settings accordingly, head to Settings > Screen and Video to manually check them and make some adjustments that need some human fine tuning. I like to leave most of the settings on this page to Automatic to allow the PS5 to pick the best choices for the wide variety of content it can play, but you can select any of the settings on this page to see your options and force an output. If you don’t see 4K (labeled as 2160p) or 120Hz as options here, this is your sign you might need to swap your HDMI cable.

To see what settings your PS5 is using at any particular moment, select “Current Video Output Signal” at the top of this page to check your work. While I mostly like to rely on the PS5’s Automatic settings, one specific change you might want to make would be applying VRR to unsupported games, which could improve fidelity at the cost of introducing instability. If you scroll down far enough on this page, you can also adjust when your console displays HDR, and go through an HDR setup wizard by selecting “Adjust HDR.”

You can also customize your console’s display area by selecting Screen from the sidebar on the left, which is handy if your display has an unusual aspect ratio. While you’re here, you can adjust how long you need to be away from your controller before the console dims your screen.

Finally, if you have a PS5 Pro, you can up the graphics quality on some supported PS4 games. This is under Settings > Screen and Video > Video Output > Enhance Image Quality for PS4 games.

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Mute the PS5's startup beep

Let’s say you’re having trouble sleeping, and instead of rolling around in bed, you decide to sneak out to the PS5 for a secret gaming session. Except, uh-oh, the nasty beep that the console plays at startup alerts your partner, and now you have some explaining to do. To keep this from happening, let’s turn off that beep ahead of time.

Under Settings > System > Beep and Light, toggle on Mute Beep Sound to get rid of the sound your PS5 plays at startup. Or, if you just want to make it quieter, you can do that under Volume.

While you’re here, you can also customize how bright the LED strip on the front of the console gets, under Power indicator > Brightness. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to turn it off entirely.

Change the widgets on your PS5's home screen

Credit: Sony

See all those widgets at the bottom of the Welcome Hub when you turn your PS5 on? Did you know that you can actually customize them? It’s especially handy if you’re like me and can’t stand seeing what are essentially ads taking up more than half of your display.

To adjust your PS5 Welcome Hub widgets, simply press X while hovering over the Welcome Hub tile, then navigate to the controls in the top-right corner. Here, you can select Presets to choose from various options set up by Sony, or select Edit Widgets to toggle specific widgets on and off. Personally, I disabled the News, PlayStation Plus, Wishlist, and PlayStation Store widgets, since they’re pretty much only there to sell you things.

Once you’re done selecting the widgets you want to see, before leaving Welcome Hub setup, navigate to the Settings cog and choose if you want to enable the carousel-like Large Layout, where you want notifications (Temporary Widgets) to show up, and if you want your widgets to match your broader System Appearance settings (more on that later). If you have the News widget active, you can also customize which games show news here.

Finally, to the left of the Settings cog, you can choose a background for the Welcome Hub, picking from options either prepared by Sony, bundled with certain games you own, or pulled from your Media Gallery.

Turn on your PS5's surround sound and connect Bluetooth headphones

Your PS5 can do more than basic stereo sound, even if you don’t own a physical surround sound setup. That’s thanks to the power of various virtual surround sound codecs, which come baked into the console. To turn these on, head over to Settings > Sound > Audio Output > Audio Format (Priority). Here, you can choose between Linear PCM, Dolby Atmos, Dolby Audio, and DTS. Not all of these options support virtual surround sound, and I’ll admit I’m not enough of an audiophile to know the best one for every setup, but because it supports height data, Dolby Atmos has been the most versatile pick for my soundbar.

Alternatively, you can also use Sony’s own 3D Audio technology by selecting 3D Audio (TV) or 3D Audio (Headphones) from the sidebar. Personally, I haven’t found the results here to be as rich as Dolby Atmos, but that makes sense. These are built for gamers using TV speakers or headphones, so they aren’t the best option if you’ve got a soundbar or external speaker setup. Still, they’re worth trying out if you listen over your TV’s internal speakers or via a headset. Note that only Sony’s own headsets will connect to the console wirelessly by themselves, but there are ways around that, which my colleague Jake Peterson has written about here.

Make rumble more responsive on the PS5

Sony’s so proud of the rumble and haptics in the PS5 controller that it updated its classic DualShock branding to DualSense alongside the controller’s launch. But weirdly, the haptics aren’t as strong as they could be out of the box. That’s because the PS5 controller has a microphone built-in, and Sony has intentionally weakened its haptics to prevent interference from being picked up on the mic.

If you’re like me, and you barely use the microphone in your controller, there are two ways to fix that. The first is more temporary, and simply involves pressing the clear button above the microphone icon on your controller to mute it, which will strengthen the haptics until you turn it back on. It’ll also display an orange light while the mic is off.

The second doesn’t require you to manually flip your mic on and off, and will get rid of that orange light. You can enable it by toggling on Mute under Settings > Sound > Microphone > Microphone Status When Logged In, but know that you’ll need to toggle this back to On if you need to use the microphone again.

What do you think so far?

Turn off (or reduce) the PS5's DualSense trigger haptics

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

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