The experts over at Digital Foundry, who are far more equipped to comment on the PS5 Pro versus PC debate than anyone else have gone on IGN’s podcast to talk about the PS5 Pro and its comparison to PC.
There’s no doubt that PlayStation didn’t do a very good job of explaining the PS5 Pro technical capabilities and why this is such a big moment in the console space, but Richard Leadbetter, founder of Digital Foundry has explained why direct comparisons are difficult to what exists currently.
Mark Cerny alluded to this in his presentation, but it does genuinely seem as though the AMD technology in the PS5 Pro has been created in conjunction with Sony and doesn’t exist in the PC space when it comes to AMD GPUs at the present time.
As detailed by Leadbetter, “The GPU that you’re gonna need, if you consider a holistic view of all of the different components – the enhanced ray tracing, no AMD GPU has that at the moment, the machine learning block, no AMD GPU has that – it’s almost like an Nvidia-style feature set, but made by AMD.”
He goes on to say that it’s a NVIDIA set of AI features in an AMD GPU (which again doesn’t exist yet in the PC space) and the closest GPU would be an RTX 4070. The cheapest 4070 available on popular Aussie PC retailer is $829 with most in the $900-1000 range.
“The closest equivalent GPU [to the Pro] you’ll be looking at will be the [Nvidia GeForce] RTX 4070, the 4060 is quite close to base PlayStation 5 factoring out machine learning and ray tracing.. Beyond that, you’ve got to get a CPU, a motherboard, memory, power supply, case, 2 terrabyte SSD, so the costs are going to ramp up.” continued Leadbeter
Obviously, it’s no secret that $1,200 is a lot of money for a console, but as far as actual performance goes versus that price point, we’ll probably need to wait a little bit closer to launch and see how the performance stacks up, and how much of an improvement it is, but as far as the technology goes, it does seem to be quite impressive and a genuine step forward for AMD.
I’d highly recommend watching the entire podcast HERE as it’s genuinely interesting and Richard is super knowledgable.
