Digital Foundry tested the PlayStation 5 Pro's power consumption and discovered some surprising results. According to its three-way discussion piece on YouTube featuring Richard Leadbetter, John Linneman, and Oliver Mackenzie, the PlayStation 5 Pro consumes practically no additional power than the base PS5, despite featuring a significantly more powerful GPU.
Digital Foundry tested the PS5 Pro in Elden Ring, Spider-Man 2, and F1 24. All three games were compared to the launch model of the PS5, the refreshed variant dubbed the PS5 Slim, and the Pro model, with the Pro running the Pro-exclusive version of all three games with enhanced graphical capabilities.
Elden Ring saw the PS5 Pro operating at virtually identical power draw to the PS5 Slim. In one instance of the video, the Pro model operated at 214.1 watts of power consumption, the PS5 Slim model at 216.2 watts, and the PS5 Launch model at 201.3 watts. Frame rates were inevitably much higher on the Pro, operating at 52 FPS, the PS5 Slim at 40 FPS, and the PS5 launch model at 37 FPS. (The frame rate variance between the Slim and launch models should be taken lightly, as the information displayed was taken from one snapshot of Digital Foundry's benchmark run. Both consoles are the same in terms of performance.) Effectively, the PS5 Pro was operating at the same power as the PS5 Slim, while providing a 30% higher frame rate.
Spider-Man 2 showed a slightly different story due to the game being locked to 60 FPS on all three consoles. In the same scenario, the PS5 Pro yielded the highest wattage at 232 watts, the PS5 Slim at 218.2 watts, and the PS5 launch model at 208.1 watts. In Spider-Man 2, the Pro consumed 6% more power than the PS5 Slim and 11% more power than the launch version. There were no comparisons for the F1 24 title, but Digital Foundry showed the PS5 Pro operating at around 235 watts in-game, locked at 60FPS.
Note the launch model and Slim should not be taken lightly; power consumption can change based on silicon quality, which explains why the Slim is performing worse than the launch model. Variance in silicon quality means that certain consoles can operate at their advertised CPU clock speeds at lower voltages compared to others.
Digital Foundry's testing confirmed that the PS5 Pro operates at very similar power consumption targets as the base PS5 models, despite featuring a significantly more powerful GPU. This came as a surprise to Digital Foundry, who thought the console might consume upwards of 300 watts.
The PS5 Pro is armed with an 8-core Zen 2 CPU and a 16.7 TFLOP capable RDNA-based GPU, with 576 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The regular PS5 models ship with the same CPU (though CPU clocks could be different) but with a significantly weaker 10.28 TFLOP RDNA-based GPU, featuring and 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
