Is the PS5 Pro Better than a Mid-Range PC? Let's Find Out!

Introduction the PS5 Pros finally been revealed one of the worst kept secrets in the industry I mean we've had leaks about this thing for quite some time now leaks that turned out to be true by the way because they were from developers and Sony's own papers uh so it's not really a surprise uh about the capabilities of the console but since there's a lot of talk about how it compares to PC gaming I wanted to make a video about it and share my knowledge and I'll also put together a PC build that's somewhat equivalent to a PS5 Pro and examine it a bit more closely and point out the differences between console and PC gaming because I don't feel many are talking about this I actually don't dislike consoles I have actually probably more consoles than most console Fanboys I have a PlayStation 5 with a decent collection of physical games I have a pretty big physical Nintendo switch collection I have Nintendo switch OLED and an OG one and I have a PS3 PS4 Xbox 360 OG Xbox I have games for all of these and I'm a pretty big handheld Enthusiast as well actually with the PlayStation Portable being one of my old-time favorites I also like a lot of the Nintendo handhelds as you can see uh I do like them I have a lot of games for all these things so I don't dislike consoles as a matter of fact the PS5 Pro is a very interesting piece of tech from a hardware Enthusiast perspective like myself let let's begin by taking a look PS5 Pro Specs at the PS5 Pros silicon it's using the same 8e 16 thread CPU so this is a GPU upgrade essentially GPU has gone from 36 compute units of rdna 2 to 60 compute units of rdna 3 so that's a 67% increase in compute units Tera flops it's gone from 10 teraflops to 33 teraflops now I see a lot of people uh making teraflop comparisons that is not not accurate and that does not translate to gaming performance and I will show you in a minute why it doesn't but you can't compare teraflops across different architectures and especially different GPU manufacturers as far as the memory it's still using 16 gigs although it's clocked a little bit higher this time around and it seems to be a little bit more memory available for games which is nice actually close to 14 gigs that's very good according to the leaks the compute unit increase and change in architecture was supposed to lead to a 45% increase in GPU rendering which turned out to be true first we made the GPU much larger and increased the speed of the memory it uses the result is rendering that's up to 45% faster second we made major upgrades to the ray tracing taking a streamlined and accelerated approach that allows calculation of the Rays at Double or even triple the speeds of PlayStation 5 and finally we added custom hardware for machine learning and an AI Library called PlayStation spectral super resolution or pssr for short let's PS5 Pro PC Equivalent Hardware Choices switch back to the PC side and determine what a PS5 Pro equivalent type of build could look like the RX 6700 nxd is practically identical GPU to the PS5 base they have the same exact shading units same exact tmus robs and compute units and this has been tested by digital Foundry extensively and Iceberg Tech actually and they perform very similarly so let's go ahead and find that 45% increase and see where it lands so here's our RX 6700 and 44% 45% increase lands on RX 6800 NXT this is a rdna 2 GPU same architecture as the base PS5 or 7700 XT which is rdna 3 so the 6800 and 7700 XT perform the same in gaming but if if you look at the Tara flops the 6800 is only 16 Tera flops and the 7700 XT is 35 teraflops which is very close to the PS5 Pro so even though it's 16 Tera flops of rdna2 versus 35 teraflops of rdna 3 these gpus perform the same in gaming that's why you cannot measure teraflops to measure gaming performance basically so when I see people do this online it doesn't really make makes sense you can't do that across different architectures and especially GPU manufacturers so I would say the 7700 XT Falls in that 45% rendering capability however the two to three times faster rate tracing on the PS5 Pro sounds like it's something more than the 7700 XD and that's because in a recent interview it was revealed that it was an RT engine rate tracing engine designed by AMD that's not out in any gpus yet they talked about how in a lot of ways PC gaming right now is providing a kind of an on-ramp for some of these Technologies but also allowing Sony to lead a bit with some things like raate tracing where they're using an AMD developed rate tracing technology that isn't even in existing gpus so it sounds like it could be rdna 4 uh rate tracing engine that's been bolted onto the PS5 Pro chip that's why people are saying that it could be something more comparable to an RTX 470 which is a bit faster than the 7700 XE the RTX 470 has better rate tracing than the 7700 XT obviously and it has machine learning Hardware uses dlss that's why people are saying the 4070 is more comparable for My Generous PS5 Pro Equivalent Build my somewhat PS5 Pro equivalent I use an RTX 380 TI and I'm being kind of generous here and a 3700x CPU which is is the same architecture as what's on the PS5 although the 3700x can clock quite a bit higher and has more L3 cache so it can uh it's a bit faster than the PlayStation 5 one but bear with me it's meant to illustrate a point now let's take a look at cyberpunk and Target PlayStation 5's quality mode digital Foundry seems to think that a 3070 TI is more comparable but let's be generous here and assume that it's a 380 TI again Cyberpunk 2077 PS5 Quality Mode Settings we're targeting PlayStation 5's quality mode and as you can see on the left digital Foundry listed what the PC equivalent settings are now here's why I'm making this comparison is because I see the conversation out there of uh the console Fanboys basically saying build me a $700 equivalent PC that runs like a PS5 your PC Master race you got yourself a YouTube channel and a Twitter account buy a $700 PC you can't buy RBS you can't buy used you got to buy new and it's not an Apples to Apples comparison because a PC can do so much more but not only that but it gives you full freedom and more features than a console for you to utilize how you want by being able to play around with settings for example we're getting 30 FPS right now baby and guess what when you get your PS5 Pro and play cyberpunk and send it to Quality mode this is what you're going to going to get because it's locked at 30 FPS with those settings CD project red would have to intervene and either set up a different profile for your pro which they're more than likely to do but how many of them are they going to set you're not going to have that freedom to say Okay I want to go full rate tracing and heavy upscaling or I don't want to do rate tracing and Target as close to 4K as I can you're not going to be able to do that and the fact that you can't do that and so much more on PC adds value to the PC that it is worth more money because of that not to mention that it can do so much more than just gaming but even when it comes to gaming the utility is crazy anyway we don't 60 FPS Target need to be doing 30 FPS cuz our GPU is asleep let's see if we can Target 60 well looks like this combination of Hardware can do 60 no problem and to be fair I feel the PS5 Pro would be able to do 60 with the same exact set settings no problem if CD project red give you that option right but anyway 60 is no problem what else can we do with this Hardware well I say let's add Ray Trace Reflections on top of local Shadows local Shadows don't really make that huge of a noticeable difference but Reflections do as you can see here they look really really nice and if you look at our GPU utilization it's still only at 75% we still have have more GPU Headroom to enable other settings again remember that cery said that the rate tracing is two times faster sometimes up to three and in cyberpunk it only has local Shadows on in its quality mode and runs at 30 FPS here we're running at Double the frame rate and we have local shadows and Reflections on and we're still at 60 with more GPU Headroom let's see if we can turn more rate tracing effects let's add rate race lighting RT Reflections and Ultra RT Lighting Ultra this is a very heavy rate race setting guys so I would be surprised if the PS5 Pro is able to do this and maintain 60 again this is native 1440p we're not using any form of upscaling and the 380 Titi seems to be good for around 50 FPS with this one but we do have dlss so let's try dlss now speaking of dlss I don't know how the PlayStation Spectre resolution thing is going to work is it going to have to be integrated game by game because dlss and FSR use in engine data and motion vectors to be able to render a high quality image with as little ghosting as possible so I remain very curious to see how that works but with dlss set to Quality the game still looks fantastic we're able to maintain 60 FPS and we still have more GPU Headroom again you're able to see how you can utilize your Hardware on PC how much Freedom you have and how much you can tailor that experience to how you want so to me comparing a console to PC is not even apples and cucumbers it's just like they're very very different to the type of utility and experience they can provide right you have total freedom here to do whatever you want whereas on Console you're going to have to rely on what the developer thinks you want now here we go we're Maximum Ray Tracing going to turn on rate Trace Sun shadows as well this is turning on all the rate Trace settings the only thing left is path tracing which we're going to check out by the way and look at that with all the rate tracing effects we're able to maintain a 60fps experience now even if the PS5 Pro is is an equivalent to a 380 TI which I don't think it's going to be I think it's going to be a bit slower than that in rasterization and rate tracing we can at least see that the PS5 Pro CPU at the very least could be able to maintain 60 FPS which is nice that is good because the PS5 Pro CPU is still the same okay and rate racing requires CPU resources to to work all the calculations and stuff CPU handles a lot of that console players mostly play on 4K screens though well with dlss set of performance we can maintain the same exact settings we had and upscale all the way to 4K and as you can see dlss looks actually really good even at the performance setting at 4K as you can see it looks great and we're able to maintain a 60 FPS so again you have that flexibility to Target the resolution that you want with the settings that you want with the upscaling that you want and hey on top on top of that you also have frame Generation all the new AAA games have frame generation these days as a matter of fact FSR 3 frame generation was added to cyberpunk and we can actually test that right now because I don't think we're going to be able to go above 60 FPS our CPU is at 78% sometimes we're becoming CPU bound so we can turn on frame generation and get a more fluid gameplay let's try it all right so here we go we've enabled FSR frame generation and set FSR to Performance it's not going to look as good as dlss but hey it's an option if you had an RTX 4070 for example you would have dlss and frame generation and look at that guys we're close to 100 FPS on my lg1 C1 OLED lg1 lgc1 OLED 120 HZ 4K TV it looks pretty good very fluid again I wish we could use dlss but you can't use FSR frame gener eration without FSR upscaling apparently so I wish they had implemented it better but that's besides the point again we have all the ray tracing effects but what about path tracing guys I don't think you'll be able to do path tracing on the PS5 Pro I would be amaz as a matter of fact I wish Mark cery had put together like uh something that was done inhouse to show path tracing on the PS5 Pro because maybe they could have put something together well we can actually Path Tracing do path tracing on PC because we have access to the options so let's try it we've dropped back down to 1440p we've said dlss to balance because path tracing is really demanding we have dlss raid reconstruction uh an Nvidia developed Den noising technique which actually helps quite a lot with the image quality especially with path tracing and the rest of the settings we're still using the PlayStation 5's quality mode settings and look at that I've unlocked the settings we're at UH 60 something FPS and we're going a bit higher now 70 FPS because it depends on the area that you are as a matter of fact let's uh let's lock it back to 60 make it a bit more consistent and there we go guys 60 FPS locked now we're going to go outside in the open area we might drop a bit below 60 but uh again look at that CPU utilization it's at like 80% man I don't know if the PS5 Pro would be able to do it and maintain 60 because path tracing requires a lot of CPU resources as well so this is interesting again the point Conclusion is to show you guys how much freedom and access you have to your Hardware uh that you can set the settings you want so when I see people saying uh build me a $700 PC that can perform like a PS5 Pro well a PC that performs like a PS5 Pro should be more EXP expensive in my opinion because it can do so much more it can play Xbox games it can play Playstation games it can play emulate anything from PS3 all the way back to Atari and interestingly enough actually Daniel Owen uh should check out his channel he makes awesome videos awesome PC videos he put together a build with a 40 RTX 4070 that costs around $900 now yes that's more than 700 but if I was to buy PS5 Pro I would for sure Buy the disc drive because I like physical games that's 80 bucks the stand is 20 bucks or whatever and then you have to pay for online play I think it kind of comes close to that 900 but even though the P the PC is a bit more expensive like I've shown you here the amount of Freedom that you have over your hardware and the amount of technologies that are PC exclusive the amount of G I mean you have a massive games library on PC it's massive way bigger than what's available on the PS5 it's most definitely that is worth more money now you as an individual might say well I don't care about all that I don't care about the productivity I don't care to change the settings I'm okay with whatever the developers give me uh based on the PlayStation's hardware and that's perfectly fine I understand that look I'm not going to be one of those PC guys that says you you should buy a PC and don't buy a PS5 Pro I get the PS5 Pro is essentially an Enthusiast level type of uh uh product right I mean I bought an RTX 4090 so I know how that is I'm not uh dunking on anyone for wanting to buy a PS5 Pro again people some people have a ton of uh games on their PlayStation Library they stand the benefit from a PS5 Pro so I get that my annoyance comes from uh you know when people say well you can't build a PC equivalent to a PS5 Pro when there is no such thing as a PC equivalent because the PC uh has so much freedom of what you can do with a hardware that is not really an equivalent comparison it should cost more even though it doesn't cost that much more uh as you saw you can put a bill together for 900 bucks with an RTX 470 and get already established Technologies like dlss and better rate tracing but anyway what do you guys think leave a comment down below I'm actually curious this is very interesting to me I look forward to see how the PS5 Pro does by the way but anyway thanks for watching and give the video a like if you liked it consider subscribing I'll see you in the next one bye-bye