Comment on Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts
tomalley8342@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago2060 super for 300, and then another 200 for a decent processor puts you ahead of a ps5 and for a comparable price.
you’re going to have to really scrunge up for deals in order to get psu, storage, memory, motherboard, and a case for your remaining budget of $0.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Ok so, for starters, your ‘reported equivalent’ source is wrong.
eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2024-playstation-5-p…
The APU (combined CPU + GPU, as is done in laptops) of a PS5Pro is 16.7 TFLOPs, not 33.
So your PS5 Pro is actually roughly equivalent to that posted build… by your ‘methodology’, which is utterly unclear to me, what your actual methodolgy for doing a performance comparison is.
The PS5 Pro uses 2 GB of DDR5 RAM, and 16 GB of GDDR6 RAM.
This is… wildly outside of the realm of being directly comparable to a normal desktop PC, which … bare minimum these days, has 16 GB DDR4/5 RAM, and the GDDR6 RAM would be part of the detachable GPU board itself, and would be … between 8GB … and all the way up to 32 if you get an Nvidia 5090, but consensus seems to be that 16 GB GDDR6/7 is probably what you want as a minimum, unless you want to be very reliant on AI upscaling/framegen, and the input lag and whatnot that comes with using that on an underpowered GPU.
Short version: The PS5Pro would be a wildly lopsided, nonsensical architecture to try to one to one replicate in a desktop PC… 2 GB system RAM will run lightweight linux os’s, but not a chance in hell you could run Windows 10 or 11 on that.
Fuck, even getting 7 to work with 2GB RAM would be quite a challenge… if not impossible, I think 7 required 4GB RAM minimum?
The closest AMD chip to the PS5 Pro that I see, in terms of TFLOP output… is the Radeon 7600 Mobile.
((… This is probably why Cyberpunk 2077 did not (and will never) get a ‘performance patch’ for the PS5Pro: CP77 can only pull both high (by console standards) framerates at high resolutions… and raytracing/path tracing… on Nvidia hardware, which the PS5Pro doesn’t use.))
But, lets use the PS5Pro’s ability to run CP77 at 2K60fps on … what PC players recognize as a mix of medium and high settings… as our benchmark for a comparable standard PC build. Lets be nice and just say its the high preset.
(a bunch of web searching and performance comparisons later…)
Well… actually, the problem is that basically, nobody makes or sells desktop GPUs that are so underpowered anymore, you’d have to go to the used market or find some old unpurchased stock someone has had lying around for years.
The RX 6600 in the partpicker list is fairly close in terms of GPU performance.
Maybe pair it with an AMD 5600X processor if you… can find one? Or a 4800S, which supposedly actually were just rejects/run off from the PS5 and Xbox X and S chips, rofl?
Yeah, legitimately, the problem with trying to make a PC … in 2025, to the performance specs of a PS5 Pro… is that basically the bare minimum models for current and last gen, standard PC architecture… yeah they just don’t even make hardware that weak anymore.
tomalley8342@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s shared memory, so you would need to guarantee access to 16gb on both ends.
I don’t know how you could arrive at such a conclusion, considering that the base PS5 has been measured to be comparable to the 6700.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
So… standard Desktop CPUs can only talk to DDR.
‘CPUs’ can only utilize GDDR when they are actually a part of an APU.
Standard desktop GPUs can only talk to GDDR, which is part of their whole seperate board.
GPU and CPU can talk to each other, and the mainboard.
Standard desktop PC architecture does not have a way for the CPU to directly utilize the GDDR RAM on the standalone GPU.
In many laptops and phones, a different architecture is used, which uses LPDDR RAM, and all the LPDDR RAM is used by the APU, the APU being a CPU+GPU combo in a single chip.
Some laptops use DDR RAM, but… in those laptops, the DDR RAM is only used by the CPU, and those laptops have a seperate GPU chip, which has its own built in GDDR RAM… the CPU and CPU cannot and do not share these distinct kinds of RAM.
The PS5Pro appears to have yet another unique architecture:
Functionally, the 2GB of DDR RAM can only be accessed by the CPU parts of the APU, which act as a kind of reserve, a minimum baseline of CPU-only RAM set aside for certain CPU specific tasks.
The PS5Pro’s GDDR RAM is sharable and usable by both the CPU and GPU components of the APU.
…
So… saying that you want to have a standard desktop PC build… that shares all of its GDDR and DDR RAM… this is impossible, and nonsensical.
Standard desktop PC motherboards, compatible GPUs and CPUs… they do not allow for shareable RAM, instead going with a design paradigm of the GPU has its own onboard GDDR RAM that only it can use, and DDR RAM that only the CPU can use.
You would basically have to tear a high end/more modern laptop board with an APU soldered into it… and then install that into a ‘desktop pc’ case… to have a ‘desktop pc’ that shares memory between its CPU and GPU components… which both would be encapsulated in a single APU chip.
Roughly this concept being done is generally called a MiniPC, and is a fairly niche thing, and is not the kind of thing an average prosumer can assemble themselves like a normal desktop PC.
All you can really do is swap out the RAM (if it isnt soldered) and the SSD… maybe I guess transplant it and the power supply into another case?
I can arrive at that conclusion because I can compare actual bench mark scores from a nearest TFLOP equivalent, more publically documented, architecturally similar AMD APU… the 7600M. I specifically mentioned this in my post.
This guy in the article here … well he notes that the 6700 is a bit more powerful than the PS5Pro’s GPU component.
The 6600 is one step down in terms of mainline desktop PC hardware, and arguably the PS5Pro’s performance is… a bit better than a 6600, a bit worse than a 6700, but at that level, all of the other differences in the PS5Pro’s architecture give basically a margin of error when trying to precisely dial in whether a 6700 or 6600 is a closer match.
You can’t do apples to apples spec sheet comparisons… because, as I have now exhaustively explained:
Standard desktop PCs do not share RAM between the GPU and CPU. They also do not share memory imterface busses and bandwidth lanes… in standard PCs, these are distinct and seperate, because they use different architectures.
I got my results by starting with TFLOPs output from a PS5Pro, finding a nearest equivalent APU with PassMark benchmark scores, reported by hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of users, then compared those PassMark APU scores to PassMark conventional GPU scores, and ended up with ‘fairly close’ to an RX 6600.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Just to add to this, the reason you only see shared memory setups on PCs with integrated graphics is because it lowers performance compared to dedicated memory which is less of a problem if your GPU is only being used in 2D mode (mainly because that uses little memory), but more of a problem when used in 3D mode as the PS5 is meant to be used most of the time.
So the PS5 having shared memory is not a good thing and actually makes it inferior compared to a PC made with a GPU and CPU of similar processing power using the dominant gaming PC architecture (separate memory).
tomalley8342@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
People are not trying to replicate the Sony’s console hardware layout, they are trying to have the same gaming experience. I’m not sure how I can make it any clearer than pointing out an article which showed that the 6700 has similar performance across 7 separate games to the base Playstation 5. Not the Playstation 5 Pro, the base Playstation 5.