PC vs. PS5 Pro: Making PC gaming more relevant than ever

HardwarePC vs. PS5 Pro: Making PC gaming more relevant than everWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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PS5 Pro Technical Presentation hosted by Mark Cerny - YouTube

And so the Sony PS5 Pro has arrived. Verily, it’s far, far more powerful than the clunker that is now the plain old PS5, but it’s also a lot more expensive at $700. And that, dear PC gaming friends, begs the very obvious comparison.

Boil it down to basics, and the PS5 Pro is a $200 premium for a GPU upgrade. The rest of the PS5 Pro’s hardware hasn’t changed much. In that regard, the new console itself it quite gaming PC-like with a heavy emphasis on graphics performance spend.

But the uplift from $500 to $700 puts the Pro into territory where it might just have to fight to justify its existence. That’s not a problem the $500 regular PS5 had to worry about. As an overall gaming platform, a $500 PS5 versus a $500 ‘gaming’ PC was always a bit of a non starter. It’s just not enough money to build a decent entry-level rig, but $700? Well, that’s a little more plausible.

Gaming PC vs PS5 Pro: GPU

Now, in pure graphics rendering terms, you’re going to struggle to fully match a PS5 Pro with a $700 PC. The new PS5 Pro has a revised GPU with 60 AMD compute units. That’s the same number as a desktopAMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, which goes for $475 and upwards on its own, and to which you’ll need to add a case, motherboard, CPU, memory, storage and power supply, at minimum.

Of course, 60 PS5 Pro compute units aren’t directly comparable to 60 desktop AMD compute units. The desktop GPU will almost certainly have the higher power budget and clockspeed, probably more cache memory and so on.

On the other hand, the new GPU in the PS5 Pro has upgraded ray-tracing hardware that may well be more powerful and efficient than the RDNA 3 hardware in the RX 7800 XT. And while the desktop GPU will likely have that bigger power budget, it’s always a case of diminishing returns as you approach to top end of the power scale.

Swipe to scroll horizontallyPS5 Pro vs PS5 specificationsHeader Cell - Column 0PS5 ProPS5CPUZen 2 (unconfirmed)Zen 2Cores/threads8/168/16GPURDNA 3 (unconfirmed)RDNA 2Compute Units6036Memory18 Gbps GDDR614 Gbps GDDR6MSRP (at launch)$700$499 / $399

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PS5 Pro vs PS5 specificationsHeader Cell - Column 0PS5 ProPS5CPUZen 2 (unconfirmed)Zen 2Cores/threads8/168/16GPURDNA 3 (unconfirmed)RDNA 2Compute Units6036Memory18 Gbps GDDR614 Gbps GDDR6MSRP (at launch)$700$499 / $399

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Anyway, taken in the round, the PS5 Pro will probably be a little slower than a desktop RX 7800 XT for traditional raster performance, but likely on par or even a little quicker with ray tracing thrown into the mix. You also have to factor in the vagaries of comparative CPU performance, what with the PS5 Pro’s elderly AMD Zen 2 cores, memory subsystem, storage, and the rest.

Gaming PC vs. PS5 Pro: CPU

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A screenshot from a Sony presentation announcing the PS5 Pro