Last Updated on March 2, 2022
For PlayStation fans, it is known that the newest PS5 is a powerful machine that provides smooth gameplay and crystal clear graphics.
However, for those who want a similar experience on their PC, you need a GPU that is similar to the PS5 graphics card. When you are measuring the power of a console, you have to consider everything from teraflop output to resolution and ray tracing.
Which Graphics Card Is Equivalent to the PS5?
Your instinct may be to immediately rush out and find the best GPU the market has to offer, but with a worldwide shortage in manufacturing, individual graphics cards can be pricey. It’s wise to know exactly which graphics card mirrors the design of the games you want.
For the PS5, that seems to be the RTX 2070.
Read on to learn why that is, and how you can implement it to improve your overall gaming experience.
Why You Want a PS5 Equivalent Graphics Card
The PS5 has a theoretical 10.28 teraflop output along with 16 GB, a memory clock of 1750 MHz, and a GPU clock of 2233 MHz. It has been specifically designed with lazor-cut graphics and run at 120fps to support games like Borderlands 3, Devil May Cry 5, and Destiny 2.
The PS5 might not be the fastest console on the market (that award goes to the Xbox Series X), it is still a drastic improvement on the PS4. The PS4 has 1.8 teraflops while the PS4 Pro had 4.2.
As technology evolves faster and faster, now is the perfect time to use that technology kindly developed by Sony to upgrade your PC. Your gut instinct may be to go out and find something comparable to the 10.28 teraflop output of the PS5 graphics card, but that metric alone won’t be enough to deliver a comparable experience.
Best PS5 Equivalent Graphics Cards
Here are the two best PS5 Equivalent Graphics Cards:
Radeon AMD RX 6800 XT
- This GPU is about on par with the PS5 where it counts. With 16GB of RAM and ray-tracing capabilities, it also has almost double the teraflops at a whopping 20.74! It has 72 enhanced Compute Units and 128 MB of AMD Infinite Cache. All of this along with the enormous teraflop output will allow you plenty of leeway for playing those console games at 60fps.
Nvidia RTX 3070
- This GPU is almost as comparable to the PS5 as the AMD RX 6800 XT. It barely comes in second with 20 teraflops and 10GB of RAM. It, along with the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, is powered by Nvidia’s 2nd generation RTX architecture. They focus mainly on enhanced ray tracing and tensor cores along with high-speed memory and streaming multiprocessors.
Why Teraflops Aren’t Enough For Quality Graphics
What is a Teraflop?
A teraflop refers to how many calculations the processor can make per second. In the past, computers could only process a few flops at a time. By 2021, we are now up in the trillions. That’s quite a leap.
However, with technology advancing that quickly, processing power alone isn’t enough to measure the efficiency of a console. After all, the Switch only has .3 teraflops, but no one doubts that it is able to keep up with its larger competitors. So what else is needed?
Game Evolution
In their infancy, the quality of a gaming console was measured by its teraflop output, or how powerful it was. The industry focused on increasing teraflops because that was the most advanced technology available.
However, nowadays, developers can focus on things like resolutions and ray tracing. This means that, while the overall teraflop output might not be increasing, the overall quality and visual experience of a game or console can still improve dramatically.
Ray Tracing
An important component of gaming quality mentioned above is ray tracing. It deserves its own exclamation because it can completely change the aesthetic and quality of a game you are playing. Ray tracing is a technology that mimics how light is reflected in the real world and creates realistic and vibrant effects. It is the reason moonlight reflecting off a pond or city lights shining on a car door can take a game from simple pixels on a screen to an emotional journey into the game.
Frame Pacing
Many newer game consoles will run at 120fps. While 120fps would be almost impossible for any PC to maintain, many would argue that there isn’t much of a difference in quality between 120fps and 60fps. In fact, technology is advancing so quickly that many agree that anything past 120fps will actually be indetectable by the human eye.
That being said, there can be a major difference between 30fps and 60fps. Most computers monitors run at least 60fps. If you try playing a console game that is developed at 30fps, you will get frames that overlap, which will cause stuttering and jittering and can make certain games unplayable.
PS5 Equivalent Graphics Card Combined with DSSL
No matter how you look at it, technology in the gaming world is evolving fast. If you want to keep up with new advances without having to buy a new console every year, you need a PC that is versatile enough to handle some serious tweaking. The Radeon AMD RX 6800 XT and the Nvidia RTX 3070 are two GPUs that are more than capable of keeping up with 60fps.
Remember that teraflops aren’t all that matters when choosing a graphics card for your PC. You need to also consider the resolution, frame pacing, ray tracing, and frames per second along with so much more if you have a PC.
Don’t be afraid to adjust the settings to get them just right for the game you’re playing. Nvidia has also recently come out with DSSL, or Deep Learning Super Sampling. Adding this AI will help your computer monitor make sense of any confusion from different game settings.
Either of the two GPUs above is more than the equivalent of a PS5 graphics card. Choose which one is best for you, and with the help of DSSL, you will be on your way to playing whatever beautiful PS5 game you want on your own personal PC.