Onto further custom testing now and I went into this one with something on my mind. When PS5 Pro was announced, various press went on a mission to build a PC with similar specs at a price-point not a million miles away from the Pro's $700 - and generally failed. Well, back then, I anticipated that a GPU similar to a downclocked RTX 4070 was probably the closest GPU you could get to Pro performance - but that was before RDNA 4 and before the RTX 5060 Ti. Both of these cards are pretty good at achieving Pro-like performance levels, sometimes with performance to spare.

I kicked off myu testing by looking at BMW - Black Myth: Wukong. It's not the most optimised of console games but a good place to start. Performance mode on Pro still runs at native 1080p and while frame generation is bafflingly used in this game, the prologue stage does not use it. As we're running unlocked effectively, we can compare our PC GPUs at the same settings to the Pro. In fact, we could actually push further. We have horsepower to spare, meaning that I could use DLSS performance mode upscaling to 4K on the 5060 Ti, while I'm using the Optiscaler mod on RX 9060 XT to force on FSR 4 performance mode (Optiscaler is a cool mod for hijacking upscaler inputs and routing them through FSR 4, adding support for many games).

So with our PC GPUs, we're using the internal resolution as Pro but with the upscaling overhead on top. Even so, we're five percent faster on 9060 XT vs Pro, rising to 27 points clear on 5060 Ti. One might imagine that DLSS overhead is lower than FSR 4 here.

More Pro comparisons? I also looked at Forza Horizon 5, where we're capped at 60fps on PS5 Pro. This version of the game has a 60fps performance mode that takes the existing base console performance mode and spruces up environment settings, which I matched in the PC version (if it's not a complete match, it's very very close). We can't see the full power of the Pro here with that v-sync cap, but both 9060 XT and 5060 Ti average at over 70fps, with a 2.7 percent lead for the 5060 Ti. So, that's native 4K on a so-called budget card - understandable as this is a game built for 4K on consoles, so it's no surprise to see today's mainstream GPUs able to do the same.

I looked at Alan Wake 2 next, beginning with a comparison to PS5 Pro's performance mode. This upscales from 864p to 4K using FSR 2, with quality settings equivalent to the base console's quality mode - which is essentially PC's medium. This is easy to replicate then and as the Pro is mostly running under 60fps in our stress test scene, we are finding the limits of the GPU. RX 9060 XT is 13 percent faster than PS5 Pro, 5060 Ti 10 ten percent ahead of the console.

Alan Wake 2 has other modes of course, but as these use ray tracing, they're impossible to fully match. The RT setting on PS5 Pro is effectively lower than low. Even so, I thought I would give it a go. The Pro's quality modeis capped at 30fps, with a 4K output resolution using FSR 2 balanced mode, effectively upscaling from 1270p. As it is capped at 30fps, we aren't seeing the Pro's full power, our benchmark scene can find a dip beneath, meaning we've found Pro limits. Both our PC alternatives struggle - we need that lower than low RT set-up to get a true measure of how close we get to the console. Even with this extra load though, we're clearly demonstrating that we are in the ballpark of GPU performance from Sony's somewhat expensive console.

So, months after the intense speculation about what kind of GPU is required to give performance broadly equivalent to Sony's enhanced console, we finally have two good answers: RTX 5060 Ti and RX 9060 XT, both in their 16GB configurations. Even with the exceptionally nicely priced RX 9060 XT, I still think you'd struggle to match Sony's price-point with your own custom build - at least for now. On top of that, while the RTX 5060 Ti is a fair chunk more expensive, features like DLSS multi frame-gen open the doot to experiences like Cyberpunk 2077 running RT Overdrive, using DLSS balanced mode to upscale to 1440p and runnig a path-traced experience at well over 100 frames per second... a feat that consoles will need another generation to achieve.

AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT Analysis