The PS5 Pro Achieves 30% Performance Boost with Comparable Power Usage to Standard PS5

Digital Foundry recently delved into the power consumption of the PlayStation 5 Pro and shared some intriguing insights. In a detailed video discussion on YouTube with Richard Leadbetter, John Linneman, and Oliver Mackenzie, they revealed that despite the PS5 Pro having a more robust GPU, it surprisingly uses almost the same amount of power as the original PS5.

The tests involved running games like Elden Ring, Spider-Man 2, and F1 24. They compared these games across the PS5 launch model, the newly refreshed PS5 Slim, and the PS5 Pro, utilizing the Pro’s exclusive enhanced graphical settings where available.

In Elden Ring, the power consumption of the PS5 Pro was virtually on par with the PS5 Slim. During one video segment, the Pro consumed 214.1 watts, the Slim used 216.2 watts, while the launch model used 201.3 watts. Despite similar power usage, the Pro consistently delivered higher performance, achieving 52 frames per second compared to the Slim’s 40 FPS and the launch model’s 37 FPS. It’s important to note the frame rate variations between the Slim and launch models aren’t too significant since they are derived from a single benchmark snapshot and both consoles typically perform similarly.

Spider-Man 2 told a slightly different tale with all consoles capping at 60 FPS. Here, the PS5 Pro consumed the most power at 232 watts, followed by the Slim at 218.2 watts, and the launch model at 208.1 watts. This means the Pro used 6% more power than the Slim and 11% more than the launch model. Although comparisons for F1 24 weren’t made, the Pro managed to run at around 235 watts in-game, maintaining a steady 60 FPS.

It’s noteworthy that both the launch and Slim models can exhibit power variations due to the quality of their internal components. This quality variance could mean the Slim sometimes performs worse than the launch model in terms of power efficiency, as some consoles are capable of maintaining CPU speeds at lower voltages.

Digital Foundry’s findings reinforced that the PS5 Pro maintains a similar power consumption to the base models despite its enhanced GPU capabilities. Initially, they expected the Pro to use upwards of 300 watts, which was not the case.

The PS5 Pro is equipped with a powerful 8-core Zen 2 CPU and a 16.7 TFLOP RDNA-based GPU, delivering 576 GB/s of memory bandwidth. In contrast, the standard PS5 shares the same CPU but features a lesser 10.28 TFLOP GPU and a bandwidth of 448 GB/s.

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