When Sony announced the PS5 Pro, it said the console would be able to offer a 45% improvement in gaming performance when rasterized. Digital Foundry tested several games using “boost mode” and was able to confirm this that promise is not fulfilled because the performance improvement is between 30% and 35% depending on each specific game.

“Boost mode” is applied to games that do not have a patch to adapt them to the PS5 Pro and therefore cannot use one of the most important technologies introduced by this new console, PSSR. With “boost mode” the greatest brute force is used of this console to improve gaming performance in the various available modes.

And why doesn’t the PS5 Pro offer a 45% improvement over the PS5? One of the most important reasons would be the limitations that the GPU of this new console suffers from. at the bandwidth level, because the increase in computing units was much higher than the increase in bandwidth.

PS5 Pro has GPU sa 66.67% more shaders than PS5 but bandwidth increased by only 28%and this is a problem because bandwidth can severely limit GPU performance, especially when moving at resolutions higher than 1080p. The higher the resolution, the greater the need for bandwidth, which is why more powerful graphics cards have more bandwidth.

I know some of our readers will think that it can’t be, that the Radeon RX 6800 also has a 256-bit bus and that its memory runs at 16 Gbps, and that’s true, but you’re forgetting a very important detail and that’s it this graphics card has a 128 MB L3 cache block which is capable of generating huge bandwidth spikes and which helps improve performance even in 4K resolution.

PS5 Pro GPU it has no L3 cache supportso it depends entirely on the bandwidth it achieves through the 256-bit bus and its 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory. To this we must add the disadvantages of a unified memory interface, namely that accesses to it are interchangeable between CPU and GPU, which ends increasing latency.

It’s becoming more and more clear to me, the PS5 Pro is a system with significant imbalances (CPU being one of the most severe), It’s not even worth it which the PS4 Pro had at the time in terms of price-performance and it is a very difficult console to recommend. The PS5 Slim in the digital version is a much more interesting option, especially if we find it on sale for less than 449 euros.