PS5 Pro Delivers 30% Performance Boost with Comparable Power Efficiency to Base Model

The team at Digital Foundry recently put the new PlayStation 5 Pro through its paces, checking out how much power it uses, and stumbled upon some unexpected findings. In a YouTube discussion, Richard Leadbetter, John Linneman, and Oliver Mackenzie revealed that the PS5 Pro doesn’t draw significantly more power than the original PS5, even though its GPU is much more powerful.

Their testing was conducted using popular titles like Elden Ring, Spider-Man 2, and F1 24. They compared the performance of the PS5 Pro with the original launch PS5, the refreshed PS5 Slim, and the enhanced Pro version, with each game running the Pro’s exclusive graphics mode.

In Elden Ring, they noticed that the PS5 Pro had a power consumption almost identical to the PS5 Slim. For instance, at one point, the Pro model was drawing 214.1 watts, the Slim 216.2 watts, and the original PS5 201.3 watts. Interestingly, the PS5 Pro managed to maintain a higher frame rate, hitting 52 FPS compared to the Slim’s 40 FPS and the original’s 37 FPS. It’s worth noting that both the Slim and the launch models perform equally, with the frame rate differences mostly being situational.

Spider-Man 2 painted a different picture since the game was capped at 60 FPS across all three consoles. Here, the PS5 Pro consumed a bit more power, registering 232 watts against the Slim’s 218.2 watts and the original’s 208.1 watts. This meant the Pro drew 6% more power than the Slim and 11% more than the original. While they didn’t do direct comparisons for F1 24, the Pro was seen drawing around 235 watts during gameplay, maintaining a steady 60 FPS.

It’s essential to remember that silicon quality can affect power consumption. Variations in how the chips are made mean that some consoles run their CPUs at the advertised speeds using less voltage. This explains why the PS5 Slim sometimes lags behind the original model.

Digital Foundry’s evaluation of the PS5 Pro affirmed that its power draw is similar to that of the base models, even with its advanced GPU, which was surprising. They had anticipated the console might need more than 300 watts.

Nestled inside the PS5 Pro is an 8-core Zen 2 CPU, coupled with a robust 16.7 TFLOP RDNA-based GPU, and 576 GB/s memory bandwidth. The standard PS5 models have the same CPU, albeit with potentially different clock speeds, but come with a less formidable 10.28 TFLOP RDNA GPU and 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth.