Does the PS5 Pro's high price make jumping to PC instead a no brainer? Well, it's a bit more complicated than that
If paying somewhere in the region of 700 big ones has you considering your options, you will still need to whack out a calculator.
In case you haven't heard, the PS5 Pro's a bit expensive. As was slapped across a barrage of rightly flabbergasted tweets and articles in the aftermath of the console being revealed on Tuesday, it'll set you back at least $699.99/£699.99. So, a lot of people have been asking, is it a no brainer to just buy a PC instead?
Well, that exact quandary has now been posed to Richard Leadbetter, founder of acclaimed hardware boffin hive Digital Foundry by IGN, and well, the answer isn't quite as simple as 'oh yeah, of course'.
Asked what a comparable PC build to the Pro would cost, Leadbetter said: "Probably a fair bit more [than the PS5 Pro]. The GPU that you're gonna need, if you consider a holistic view of all of the different components - the enhanced ray tracing, no AMD GPU has that at the moment, the machine learning block, no AMD GPU has that - it's almost like an Nvidia-style feature set, but made by AMD.
"The closest equivalent GPU [to the Pro] you'll be looking at will be the [Nvidia GeForce] RTX 4070, the 4060 is quite close to base PlayStation 5 factoring out machine learning and ray tracing," Leadbetter continued, mentioning that the cheapest 4070 he'd found at a glance cost $540, "Beyond that, you've got to get a CPU, a motherboard, memory, power supply, case, [a] 2 terrabyte SSD, so the costs are going to ramp up."
That said, Leadbetter did go on to cite some "mitigating factors", including no longer needing to pay for a PlayStation Plus subscription in order to play games online and have cloud saves, and pointed out that you'd therefore need to properly look into the relative costs of PS5 Pro vs PC over a year to get a proper read on the situation.
He went on to add: "We might be slightly missing the point, because if you consider what the PS5 Pro is, it's a machine that's designed for new owners, it's for people that've got a PlayStation 5, but they've got enough disposable income to have a better PlayStation 5. I think that these guys are gonna have an existing library of PS4 and PS5 titles, and to make the jump out of the PlayStation ecosystem into the the PC ecosystem, you've got to leave those titles behind, your entire library that you might have amassed."
Leadbetter argued he thinks this'll be "a step too far" for a lot of established PlayStation players, and noted that it may well not be something that's as relevant for those considering jumping to PC from other platforms like Xbox.
He also said that due to the PS5 Pro's price being more expensive in certain regions, such as Europe and Japan, the argument of jumping to PC "becomes a bit more compelling" for folks in those areas of the world, and that PCs not fiiting as well into a seamlessly playing from your sofa with a controller setup is also a factor.
What do you think? Have you been weighing up buying a PC oinstead of a PS5 Pro? Let us know below.