Digital Foundry recently dived into analyzing the power consumption of the PlayStation 5 Pro, and the findings were quite unexpected. During a detailed discussion on YouTube, Richard Leadbetter, John Linneman, and Oliver Mackenzie shared that despite the PS5 Pro’s enhanced GPU, it barely uses more power than the original PS5.
In their tests, they put the PS5 Pro through its paces using games like Elden Ring, Spider-Man 2, and F1 24. They compared the Pro to the original PS5 and the newer PS5 Slim. The Pro was tested with its exclusive, graphically superior versions of these games.
A fascinating insight from playing Elden Ring was that the PS5 Pro’s power draw closely matched that of the PS5 Slim. For example, the Pro ran at 214.1 watts, while the Slim was at 216.2 watts, and the launch PS5 at 201.3 watts. Notably, the Pro hit higher frame rates, clocking in at 52 FPS compared to the Slim’s 40 FPS and the original’s 37 FPS. It’s worth noting the frame rate details might shift a bit due to their being based on a specific test setup by Digital Foundry. Essentially, the PS5 Pro offers a 30% higher frame rate at the same power usage as the Slim.
The story shifted slightly with Spider-Man 2, as all consoles were capped at 60 FPS. Here, the Pro consumed the most power at 232 watts, followed by the Slim at 218.2 watts, and the launch PS5 at 208.1 watts. The Pro used roughly 6% more power than the Slim and 11% more than the original model. Details on F1 24 weren’t provided, but it showed the Pro at about 235 watts, also locked at 60 FPS.
It’s important to remember that variations between the launch model and the Slim can occur due to differences in silicon quality, affecting how much power is needed to maintain performance.
Digital Foundry’s tests confirmed that the PS5 Pro’s power consumption stays very close to the base model PS5s, despite its advanced GPU capabilities. This was a surprise, as they expected the console to use more power, possibly over 300 watts.
The PS5 Pro features an 8-core Zen 2 CPU and a powerful 16.7 TFLOP RDNA-based GPU, with a memory bandwidth of 576 GB/s. In contrast, the regular PS5s, though equipped with the same CPU, have a weaker 10.28 TFLOP GPU and 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
