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this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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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.
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, via 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 GPU cannot and do not share these distinct kinds of RAM.
(Laptop DDR RAM is also usually a different pin count and form factor than desktop PC DDR RAM, you usually can't swap RAM sticks between them.)
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 16 GB of 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 the (correct*) 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.
...
You, on the other hand, just linked to a Tom's Hardware review of currently in production desktop PC GPUs... which did not make any mention of the PS5Pro... and them you also acted as if a 6600 was half as powerful as a PS5Pro's GPU component.... which is wildly off.
A 6700 is nowhere near 2x as powerful as a 6600.
2x as poweful as an AMD RX 6600... would be roughly an AMD RX 7900 XTX, the literal top end card of AMDs previous GPU generation... that is currently selling for something like $1250 +/- $200, depending on which retailer you look at, and their current stock levels, and which variant of which partner mfg you're going for.
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 such as when doing office work (mainly because that uses little memory), but more of a problem when used in 3D mode (such as in most modern games) which is 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).
You've got that a bit backwards. Integrated memory on a desktop computer is more "partitioned" than shared - there's a chunk for the CPU and a chunk for the GPU, and it's usually quite slow memory by the standards of graphics cards. The integrated memory on a console is completely shared, and very fast. The GPU works at its full speed, and the CPU is able to do a couple of things that are impossible to do with good performance on a desktop computer:
I... uh... what?
Integrated memory, on a desktop PC?
Genuinely: What are you talking about?
Typical PCs (and still many laptops)... have a CPU that uses the DDR RAM that is... plugged into the Mobo, and can be removed. Even many laptops allow the DDR RAM to be removed and replaced, though working on a laptop can often be much, much more finnicky.
GPUs have their own GDDR RAM, either built into the whole AIB in a desktop, or inside of or otherwise a part of a laptop GPU chip itself.
These are totally different kinds of RAM, they are accessed via distinct busses, they are not shared, they are not partitioned, not on desktop PCs and most laptops.
They are physically and design distinct, set aside, and specialized to perform with their respective processor.
The kind of RAM you are talking about, that is shared, partitioned, is LPDDR RAM.... and is incompatible with 99% of desktop PCs
...
Also... anything, on a desktop PC, that gets loaded and processed by the GPU... does at some point, have to go through the CPU and its DDR RAM first.
The CPU governs the actual instructions to, and output from, the GPU.
A GPU on its own cannot like, ask an SSD or HDD for a texture or 3d model or shader.
(addition to the quote is mine)
Like... there is GPU Direct Storage... but basically nothing actually uses this.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2609584/what-happened-to-directstorage-why-dont-more-pc-games-use-it.html
Maybe it'll take off someday, maybe not.
Nobody does dual GPU SLI anymore, but I also remember back when people thought multithreading and multicore CPUs would never take off, because coding for multiple threads is too haaaaarrrrd, lol.
...
Anyway, the reason that emulators have problems doing the things you describe consoles a good at... is because consoles have finetuned drivers that work with only a specific set of hardware, and emulators have to reverse engineer ways of doing the same, which will work on all possible pc hardware configurations.
People who make emulators generally do not have direct access to the actual proprietary driver code used by console hardware.
If they did, they would much, much more easily be able to... emulate... similar calls and instruction sets on other PC hardware.
But they usually just have to make this shit up on the fly, with no actual knowledge of how the actual console drivers do it.
Reverse engineering is astonishingly more difficult when you don't have the source code, the proverbial instruction manual.
Its not that desktop PC architecture ... just literally cannot do it.
If that were the case, all the same issues you bring up that are specific to emulators... would also be present with console games that have proper ports to PC.
While occasionally yes, this is sometimes the case, for some specific games with poor quality ports... generally no, not this is not true.
Try running say, an emulated Xbox version of Deus Ex: Invisible war, a game notoriously handicapped by its console centric design... try comparing the PC version of that, on a PC... to that same game, but emulating the Xbox version, on the same exact PC.
You will almost certainly, for almost every console game with a PC port... find that the proper PC version runs better, often much, much better.
The problem isn't the PC's hardware capabilities.
The problem is that emulation is inefficient guesswork.
Like, no shade at emulator developers whatsoever, its a miracle any of that shit works at all, reverse engineering is astonishingly difficult, but yeah, reverse engineering driver or lower level code, without any documentation or source code, is gonna be a bunch of bullshit hacks that happen to not make your PC instantly explode, lol.