Which AMD GPU Is Equivalent To The PlayStation 5?

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Consoles get a bad rep for being underpowered. For instance, you can find plenty of gaming laptops that blow the PS5 out of the water, and if you want to take it up a notch, it's easy to track down graphics cards that outperform the PS5 Pro. Say you wanted to build something equivalent to the current-generation Sony console, but you don't want to bust the bank. In that case, what AMD GPU is similar to the PlayStation 5?

The AMD Radeon RX 6700XT comes the closest, although it's a bit more powerful. The PS5 already sports a custom AMD GPU based on the newer RDNA 2 architecture. This means that the device is capable of ray tracing, variable rate shading, and mesh shaders – technologies that the RX 6700XT also supports. Its GPU has 36 compute units that operate up to 2.23 GHz. And the memory? It has 16 GB of GDDR6, but it's shared by the GPU and another custom AMD part: a Zen 2-based CPU. The AMD Radeon 6700XT, in comparison, has 40 compute units and 12GB of GDDR6 memory.

Raw power isn't everything in developing games. A PlayStation 5 has standardized hardware and an integrated design. As such, it's easier to optimize for than a PC, where hardware combinations are nearly impossible to count. That said, the extra power of the RX 6700 XT certainly helps. In "Alan Wake 2," for instance, the PS5 achieves stable 30 FPS in Quality mode and 60 FPS in Performance mode. The RX 6700XT can hit around 60 FPS in Quality, so depending on the game, you can expect double the FPS,  which is to be expected from a $722 card.

Stack up the AMD Radeon RX 6700XT against a PS5, and in most cases it can outperform it. If you're not really convinced by Alan Wake's attempts to leave the dark place at a stable 60 FPS, maybe you'll find "The Last of Us 2 Remastered" a better example, which was developed with PS5 in mind. However, the results are so close that you'd expect it to get double the framerate. The RX 6700XT delivers nearly 60 FPS in Quality mode, while the PS5 is still locked to 30 FPS.

Is there something that matches the PS5 more closely, warts and all? A previous-generation RX 5700XT was long considered to be the approximation to the PS5, despite having just 8GB of VRAM and a lower clock speed. If you fire up FSR Quality at 1080p in "Alan Wake 2," you'll get 30 FPS, a bit closer to the PS5. The card is old now and will likely become obsolete in a few years, but you can still get it on Amazon for a little over $220. PlayStation 5 on a meager budget? To a degree.

Nonetheless, plenty of gamers swear some games look better on PS5, despite it being fairly underpowered by today's standards. Chalk it up to optimization or psychology; it doesn't really matter all that much as long as you're happy. And the RX 6700XT, since it's fairly beefy, will likely make you ecstatic. Sure, it may cost a bit more than Nvidia's PS5 equivalent, the GeForce RTX 2070, but it delivers superior performance, which is a massive win for any PC enthusiast.