PlayStation 5 Pro performance falls short of Sony’s promised 45% jump from base model

TL;DR: Digital Foundry experts discussed the PlayStation 5 Pro’s performance, noting it delivers 30-35% gains over the base model, less than Sony’s claimed 45%. They attribute this shortfall to memory bandwidth limitations, especially at 4K resolutions.

The experts from Digital Foundry have discussed the performance uplift for Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro and how it comes to the base model and Sony’s marketing for the new console.

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According to the experts who discussed the newly released console on their weekly podcast, Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro is delivering anywhere between 30% and 35% performance gains compared to the base model, which falls short of Sony’s touted 45% gains found scattered among PS5 Pro marketing. Notably, the experts point to memory bandwidth limitations as being the likely culprit for lacking performance gains at higher resolutions. For those that don’t know, raw GPU horsepower doesn’t necessarily equal more performance in games, as memory bandwidth also plays a big role, especially at higher resolutions such as 4K.

From the testing that was conducted by Digital Foundry the experts found the lackluster performance gains at higher resolutions, which leads them to suspect the PS5 Pro’s 28% increase in memory bandwidth versus the standard model may be the limitation as to what is holding back the console from reaching Sony’s touted 45%. However, this is just a working theory at the moment, as Digital Foundry said more testing needs to be done to determine the cause.

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The tech experts also pointed out that massive performance improvements could be seen at different resolutions and framerates, such as 1080p at 120Hz, as 1080p, being a much smaller resolution than 4K, requires much less memory bandwidth of the GPU.