Will PS5 Pro be as powerful as RTX 4090? Expected performance and more explored

The PS5 Pro has been in the rumor mill for a while now. The mid-cycle refresh to the ninth-gen home video game console from Sony is expected to be a gaming powerhouse. The machine has long been touted to bring 8K gaming to the masses, which requires significant computing horsepower, four times more than that of native 4K.

All of this means the underlying hardware powering the upcoming Pro revision will have to be very capable. Since the current console struggles at UHD resolutions, rumor has it the upgraded variant will feature much more powerful hardware comparable to the most potent GPUs available for PC.

Let's go over the possibility of the PS5 being more powerful than the Nvidia RTX 4090, the unrivaled champion of desktop graphics cards. Do note that none of this information is confirmed and is solely based on our expectations and speculations.

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Can the PS5 Pro rival the RTX 4090?

PlayStations generally don't rank among the most powerful hardware in the market, even when they launch. For instance, when the PS5 launched back in 2020, it was only as powerful as the Nvidia RTX 2070 Super, and both Nvidia and AMD had more powerful PC graphics cards to offer at the time.

In addition, the upcoming PS5 Pro won't target 8K gaming at all, as discussed in our speculations article on the same. In a world where 1080p continues to be the most popular gaming resolution, with almost 60% market share and 4K still not being mainstream, it would be foolish to launch a console targeting 8K gaming.

The main concern of targeting such high resolutions is the added cost that would only make the upcoming PlayStation unaffordable for the majority of the gaming crowd. Generally, Sony consoles cost about $500-600. The PS5 Pro won't be able to fit in the RTX 4090's performance class while operating under such tight budgets. Thus, we can expect the console to extend its lead at UHD and deliver high refresh rate gaming experiences at the resolution.

For the most part, the upcoming PS5 Pro would be as powerful as the RTX 4070 or the 4070 Ti. Since the console will be based on AMD hardware, it would be more of an equivalent to an RX 7700 XT or an RX 7800. Both these GPUs are yet to launch, and only time will tell how powerful the Pro-grade revision will be.

However, none of this is confirmed by Sony. Recently, Take-Two Interactive's CEO Strauss Zelnick has claimed that all recent leaks surrounding the console "aren't that meaningful." While this inadvertently confirms the existence of the device, it also means that we might be in for something completely different with the upcoming refresh.