Which AMD GPU is equivalent to PlayStation 5?

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Consoles get a bad reputation for being underpowered. For example, 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. Let’s say you want to build something equivalent to the current generation Sony console, but you don’t want to break the bank. In this case, which AMD GPU is similar to PlayStation 5?

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

Raw power isn’t everything in game development. A PlayStation 5 has standardized hardware and an integrated design. As such, it’s easier to optimize than a PC, where hardware combinations are almost impossible to count. That said, the RX 6700 XT’s extra power certainly helps. In “Alan Wake 2,” for example, the PS5 achieves a stable 30 FPS in Quality mode and 60 FPS in Performance mode. The RX 6700XT can reach around 60 FPS in quality, so depending on the game you can expect double the FPS, which is what you would expect from a $722 card.

Compare the AMD Radeon RX 6700XT to a PS5 and in most cases it can outperform it. If you’re not really convinced by Alan Wake’s attempts to leave the darkness at a steady 60 FPS, you might find “The Last of Us 2 Remastered” a better example, developed with the PS5 in mind. However, the results are so close that one would expect the framerate to be doubled. The RX 6700XT delivers almost 60 FPS in Quality mode, while the PS5 is always locked at 30 FPS.

Is there anything that more closely matches the PS5, warts and all? A previous generation RX 5700XT was long considered an approximation of the PS5, despite only 8GB of VRAM and a lower clock speed. If you enable FSR quality at 1080p in “Alan Wake 2”, you will get 30 FPS, a little closer to 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 shoestring budget? To a certain extent.

Still, many gamers swear that some games look better on PS5, even if they’re pretty underpowered by today’s standards. Put it down to optimization or psychology; It doesn’t really matter as long as you’re happy. And the RX 6700XT, since it’s quite beefy, will probably make you happy. Sure, it might cost a bit more than Nvidia’s PS5 equivalent, the GeForce RTX 2070, but it delivers superior performance, which is a huge win for any PC enthusiast.