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For around two months now, Sony’s new home console has been able to demonstrate its capabilities – if you can manage to buy a model. The team of the English speaking YouTube-Kanals Gamers Nexus has now compared the PS5 with different PC components in three games.
At the end of the video at the beginning of this article, Host Steve Burke comes to the following conclusion, which is both remarkable and can be questioned:
“The PS5 is an affordable living room box, equivalent to the gaming performance of a mid- to high-end gaming PC about five years ago.”
At the beginning he emphasizes at the same time that for him it is not about a test of strength between the platforms, but rather about creating an empirical comparison. The aim is to show PC components that can offer a gaming experience similar to the PS5.
How Gamers Nexus does it and Which Difficulties such generalizations bring with them, let’s take a closer look below.
If you want to know exactly which hardware is in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and how it compares to a current Windows PC, you can find out in our comparison:
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PS5 vs. Xbox Series X vs. PC im Specs-Vergleich
Test criteria and methodology
Burke emphasizes that he and his team would deliberately limit ourselves to a single feature of the PS5 for this video, which sets Sony’s new console apart from the old generation. With the 120 FPS function, they have opted for a novelty that was previously reserved for the PC.
The selected games are all brought to the screen at the same time using classic rasterization. The ray tracing performance of the PS5 does not play a role in this specific comparison.
Gamersnexus has tested these games:
- Devil May Cry 5 (PS5: Special Edition)
- Dirt 5
- Borderlands
The graphics settings of the PC versions According to Burke, they have been meticulously adapted to their console counterparts. Cases in which this was not possible are clearly communicated in the video.
The team also decided to test all three games on both platforms in a resolution of 1920×1080 in order to largely avoid dynamic scaling of the resolution in the PS5 versions in favor of a simpler comparison.
While the performance of PC configurati ons can be measured internally using conventional methods, the PS5 requires the use of a capture card.
The latter records the images output by the GPU. Based on the images, the respective rendering times and the average images per second and thus also the computing power of the console can then be derived.
How good is the PlayStation 5 in general? You can find out in the following video to the conclusion of the new Sony console:
9:06
PlayStation 5 in under 10 minutes
PS5 and PC in comparison
Although an eight-core processor with 16 threads is at the heart of the PS5, according to Gamers Nexus, a Ryzen 3 3300X is sufficient on the PC to achieve a comparable performance profile in the three games tested. According to the test results, however, the demands on the graphics unit vary more.
- Devil May Cry 5 achieved an average refresh rate of 109 FPS in the PS5 test run. Meanwhile, an Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 with 6.0 GB shows the same scene on the PC with an average of 142 frames per second. In addition, Burke notes in his analysis that the PS5 version suffers from isolated frame rate drops. The render times on the PC remained consistent.
- In Dirt 5 Gamers Nexus posted an average of 119 FPS on the PS5. In combination with a Geforce GTX 1080, the PC was only able to achieve an average of 109 FPS. As before, however, the rendering times on the PC are more consistent. According to Burke, it should also be noted that the two Dirt 5 versions cannot be matched in every detail. This also includes the fact that the resolution of the PS5 can be both lower and higher than 1080p in some scenarios.
- For comparison in Borderlands 3 the team uses a Geforce GTX 1070 Ti, which brings an average of 130 FPS to the screen. The PS5 lines up at 119 FPS. In terms of rendering times, the PC is once again in the lead.
The test result from Gamers Nexus
These results lead to the statements by Burke cited at the beginning, according to which the PS5 is on the Performance level of a mid-range to high-end PC around five years old is located. In terms of price-performance ratio, the console would be worthwhile.
At the same time, Burke emphasizes once again that this statement is not intended to put a platform in a better light. Rather, the focus would be on the expectations of console and PC gamers regarding their respective hardware.
This is an important point that also applies to times gone by and older consoles. If you want to know the strange way in which the first PlayStation was created, you can find out in our plus report:
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Generalizations are difficult
It’s important to reiterate that this is just a test of the PS5 in 120 FPS mode. In principle, the performance profile of the PC configurations or the PS5 could change in different areas of application.
Title selection can also play a big role. In addition, two of the games tested run at practically 120 FPS. If one assumes that the games cannot display more than 120 FPS on the PS5, then it does not necessarily exhaust its full potential here.
Differences from the game can also be seen in the colleagues of Digital Foundry. For example, they state that the PS5’s graphics performance in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is similar to that of a Geforce RTX 2080. However, there is also a purely GPU-bound scenario.
In the 120 FPS comparison of Gamers Nexus, however, the effects of various factors can be seen that have an impact on the performance – this could include a relatively low single core performance of the PS5 CPU.
A question of perspective
It should not be forgotten that perspective matters. For example, if you name the slightly faster and current RTX 3060 Ti instead of an RTX 2080 or the similarly fast RTX 2060 from Nvidia’s next GPU generation instead of a GTX 1070 Ti, that sounds less old. And the Ryzen 3 3300X used by GamersNexus wasn’t even released until 2020, as you can find out in our review:
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AMD Ryzen 3 3300X- Almost the fastest quad-core CPU
The analysis of GamersNexus is quite interesting, but from our point of view it is a snapshot with limited informative value.
Ultimately, Burke is also well aware of this, who at the end of the video points to the possibilities of the PlayStation 5 that have so far only been partially exhausted.
On the one hand, it’s about fast data storage and streaming (you can read more about this with the colleagues at GamePro), on the other hand about the ray tracing capabilities. In the case of five-year-old PC graphics cards, the latter are ultimately not available, at least with a view to appropriate hardware acceleration.
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