PS5 Pro makes the PC more relevant than ever

THE PS5 PRO has arrived. It's far, far more powerful than the plain old PS5, but it's also a lot more expensive at $700. Does the PS5 Pro make gaming PCs look like good value again? Or are GPU prices still so high, you'd have to be very serious about PC gaming to overlook Sony's latest console?

- Jeremy Laird

Boil it down to basics, and the PS5 Pro is a $200 premium for a GPU upgrade. The rest of the PS5 Pro’s hardware hasn’t changed much. But the uplift from $500 to $700 puts the Pro into territory where it might just have to fight to justify its existence. As a gaming platform, a $500 PS5 versus a $500 ‘gaming’ PC was always a bit of a non-starter. It’s just not enough money to build a decent entry-level rig. But $700? Well, that’s a little more plausible.

In graphics rendering terms, you’ll struggle to match a PS5 Pro with a $700 PC. The new PS5 Pro has a revised GPU with 60 AMD compute units. That’s the same as a desktop AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, which goes for $475 and upward on its own, and to which you need to add a case, motherboard, CPU, memory, storage, and power supply, at minimum.