Consoles currently use the same components as a gaming computer. Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X use an AMD processor and graphics card that are based on solutions developed for PC gaming. But, What gaming graphics card is equivalent to the one used by the PS5?
We must emphasize that the Sony console does not use a graphics card as such. It makes use of an AMD APU, which is basically uniting a processor and a graphics card in the same package. This makes it difficult to compare the performance of this graphics card with a dedicated graphics card.
How powerful is the graphics of the PS5?
This Sony console makes use of a Graphic card (as well as its processor) developed by from AMD. They are so-called semi-custom solutions offered by AMD to adapt to the needs of any client. For this platform, a graph based on the RDNA2 architecturethe same one used by RX 6000 Series graphics. This architecture is used because it is the most modern, it offers support for DX12 Ultimate and Ray Tracing, as well as support for AMD FSR.
When it was released PS5from Sony they indicated which are the graphics card specifications. These are:
- Stream processors: 2,304 shaders
- TMU: 144 texturing units
- ROP: 64 raster units
- memory bus: of 256 bits and GDDR6 memory at 14 GHz, which leaves us with a bandwidth of 448 GB / s
- Frequency: up to 2.23GHz
- Computing Power: 10.29 TFLOPs
To make a comparison simple we are going to stay with the value of computing powerwhich in the case of the PS5 is 10.29 TFLOPs. This value tells us how many mathematical calculations it can perform per second, in this case, the graphics card. It is the best method of comparison, since all the graphics cards on the market have a value expressed in this way.
Graphics cards of similar power to the PS5
We have been searching and have found several models of graphics cards by computing power, equivalent to the PS5. According to the chosen scale, these are the equivalences:
- RTX2080: It was one of the first graphics cards on the market to support Ray Tracing and other new NVIDIA technologies. The graphics card was released in September 2018. It offers us a power of 10.07 TFLOPSbeing the closest to the graphics included in the Sony console
- RX5700XT: This AMD graphics card was released in July 2019 and has a power of 9,754 TFLOPS. It’s slightly underpowered than Sony’s console, but it’s a very good graphics card.
- RTX3060: Available from February 2021 and is currently one of the best sellers on the market. offers us a 12.74 TFLOPS powermuch more than the console of the Japanese company
- RX6600XT: One of the best graphics cards in quality / price ratio that was launched in August 2021. It offers us a 10.6 TFLOPS power and it would be, in theory, on which the GPU of the PS5 console would be based
- RTX3050: Launched on the market in early 2022, it is quite recent and is one of the cheapest from NVIDIA. Has a power of 9,098 TFLOPSbeing the least powerful of all that we have seen with a graphic power close to the PS5
Conclusions we can draw
The ones that have the closest performance in terms of power based on mathematical operations, are the NVIDIA RTX 2080 and RX 6600 XT. What’s more, theoretically it would be the basis for the console graphics integrated into the PS5. Note that the RTX 3060 would be a better option than the RTX 2080, because it is more modern and much more powerful.
We must say that there is no absolute truth in this type of equivalence. There are many factors that we could call secondary, which can be observed and taken into account. One of them could be that it is easier to develop for a console than for a PC, since on consoles there is only one hardware configuration and on PC there are many.
