Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro officially went on sale on November 7 for $699.99 in the United States. For $200 more than the base PS5’s launch price, the PS5 Pro promises a much more powerful GPU, aided by Sony’s proprietary PSSR upsampling technology, the same Zen 2 CPU but with a clock speed 10% higher, and 2 GB of additional DDR5, to name just a few improvements. These improvements should allow the PS5 Pro to perform significantly better in both PS5 Pro and standard PS5 titles.
Unsurprisingly, the PS5 Pro’s increased performance comes with increased power consumption. Digital Foundry measured a small but noticeable gap in power consumption between the base PS5 and the PS5 Pro. Oddly, DF’s PS5 Slim console appears to be equipped with a lower-performance SoC, resulting in significantly higher power consumption than the base PS5.
Power consumption of PS5 Pro compared to PS5
Starting with Elden Ring with “Quality” mode enabled, the PS5 Pro draws around 228-230W while the vanilla PS5 draws less power at 215-218W. The PS5 Slim is the anomaly here. Using a 6nm SoC, the Slim console should consume about the same or less power than the base PS5, but DF’s PS5 Slim console consumes virtually the same amount of power as the PS5 Pro (available on Amazon).
Then the PS5 Pro consumes around 230+ W in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 while the consumption of the base PS5 oscillates between 200 and 216 W. The PS5 Slim, once again, is an exception, since it consumes significantly more energy than the base PS5.
Finally, the consumption of the PS5 Pro oscillates above 230 W, with a maximum of 240 W, in F1 24 in “Quality” mode.
PS5 Pro brings notable improvements in image quality
The PS5 Pro’s increased power consumption coincides with improvements in image quality, better RT, and improved/stable frame rates. For example, DF notes that the PS5 Pro offers a 30-35% performance increase in Elden Ring in “Quality” mode, even though the game has not been explicitly improved for the Pro console. This results in refresh rates that consistently stay above 50 FPS. On the other hand, on the base PS5, the refresh rate fluctuates between 40 and 40%, and can even reach 30% on occasion.
The result of thering of Elden is quite impressive since the console only consumes around 12W, or 5.5% more power, to deliver up to 35% faster performance.
For RT updates, a good game to show off the improvements the PS5 Pro has made is Alan Wake 2. By DF, the title provides a good implementation of ray-traced reflections in its RT 30 FPS mode. Likewise, F1 24 also benefits from RT Reflections and Ambient Occlusion RT in addition to the options present in the base PS5 version.
If you want to dig deeper into the improvements the PS5 Pro offers, like the PSSR, check out DF’s article on the PS5 Pro by clicking the link below.
Buy the Sony PlayStation 5 Slim on Amazon
