The long-awaited announcement of the PS5 Pro proved to be highly controversial due to Sony’s pricing choice. Whereas the PS4 Pro launched at the same price as the base PS4 ($399), the PS5 Pro is $300 pricier than the base PS5, surprising fans and analysts alike (although the latter group still believes it’ll sell as well as the PS4 Pro in the end).
Some gamers have started wondering if they wouldn’t be better off simply buying a brand-new PC. Speaking to IGN, though, Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter said a PC with similar capabilities would probably cost ‘a fair bit more’. He also compared the PS5 Pro GPU to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070.
Probably a fair bit more. I mean, for the GPU you’re going to need, if you consider the 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 essentially an NVIDIA style feature set but made by AMD, and the closest equivalent GPU you’ll be looking at would be the RTX 4070. The RTX 4060 is quite close to the base PlayStation 5 (factoring out machine learning and ray tracing), so you’re looking at a 4070. I looked on Amazon yesterday and the cheapest one of those is $540. Beyond that, you’ve got to get a CPU, a motherboard, memory, power supply, case, and 2 TB SSD, so the costs are going to ramp up.
Then you have your mitigating factors, which is that you aren’t paying however many dollars per year for the glorious honor of being able to play online and have cloud saves, so you’ve got to kind of amortize costs over the year to get a proper idea of what the actual comparison is. I do think maybe though we might be slightly missing the point because if you consider what the PS5 Pro is, it’s a machine that’s designed – I don’t think it’s for new owners, it’s for people that have got a PlayStation 5 but they’ve got the disposable income to have a better PlayStation 5, and I think that these guys are going to have an existing library of PS4 and PS5 titles and to make the jump out of the PlayStation ecosystem and into the PC ecosystem then you’ve got to leave those titles behind your entire library that you might have amassed over, like, 10 years.
The latter point made by Leadbetter is particularly relevant, I believe. Sony isn’t trying to get PC gamers to abandon their beloved platform for a new PlayStation console—it is mostly asking existing PlayStation fans to upgrade to a better, faster version of the PS5. Whether they will manage to achieve the same level of success as the PS4 Pro (which sold around 20% of the total PS4 units) despite the high price remains to be seen.
