PS5 Pro Delivers 30% Performance Boost with Minimal Power Increase Compared to Base Model

Digital Foundry’s deep dive into the PlayStation 5 Pro’s power consumption revealed some unexpected insights. In a YouTube discussion, Richard Leadbetter, John Linneman, and Oliver Mackenzie broke down their findings, showing that the PS5 Pro’s power usage is nearly on par with the original PS5, despite having a significantly beefed-up GPU.

During their tests, Digital Foundry compared the PS5 Pro’s performance on games like Elden Ring, Spider-Man 2, and F1 24 to both the original PS5 and the newer PS5 Slim. The Pro was running enhanced versions of these games, taking full advantage of its superior graphical capabilities.

In Elden Ring, the power consumption was surprisingly similar between the Pro and the Slim models. The video showed the Pro drawing 214.1 watts compared to the Slim’s 216.2 watts, while the original PS5 came in at 201.3 watts. Despite this, the Pro delivered a significantly higher frame rate, reaching 52 FPS against the Slim’s 40 FPS and the original’s 37 FPS. The small difference between the Slim and the launch models in terms of frame rate isn’t too surprising, given that this was just a snapshot from Digital Foundry’s tests. Essentially, the Pro offers about a 30% boost in frame rate without drawing more power than the Slim.

Spider-Man 2 tells a slightly different tale since it’s capped at 60 FPS across all versions. Here, the Pro consumed 232 watts — higher than both the Slim at 218.2 watts and the launch version at 208.1 watts. This meant the Pro used about 6% more power than the Slim and 11% more than the original model. F1 24 didn’t have a direct comparison, but it did show the PS5 Pro locked at 60 FPS while consuming around 235 watts.

It’s crucial to remember that variations in power consumption can occur due to differences in silicon quality. The Slim performing worse than the original in some instances could be due to how some chips operate at lower voltages even at their advertised clock speeds.

Digital Foundry’s conclusion was quite the revelation, confirming the PS5 Pro uses similar power levels to the standard PS5 models, despite its more powerful GPU — a surprise, considering expectations were upwards of 300 watts.

The PS5 Pro packs an 8-core Zen 2 CPU alongside a potent 16.7 TFLOP RDNA-based GPU and boasts 576 GB/s of memory bandwidth. While the standard PS5 models also include the same CPU, the Pro’s GPU is notably superior, clocking in at just 10.28 TFLOPs for the latter models with 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth.