3 things I learned swapping my PS5 Pro for an Nvidia 5070 gaming rig

At the end of last year, I made quite a bold financial play, going all in on the PlayStation 5 Pro. I sold my PS5, spent a bunch of money, added an extra disc drive, and reflected on what was therefore basically the best PlayStation money could buy. I had a great time, too, with some early PS5 Pro upgrades looking simply stellar by comparison with the base console.

Then, a couple of months ago, Nvidia sent me a fairly titanic gaming rig to test out for a while, packing the all-important headline component of an RTX GeForce 5070 Ti graphics card at its heart. It upended my expectations of how 2025 would feel for me from a gaming perspective, and I've been using it nonstop since it arrived. So, what's it like going from the world's most powerful console to a veritable beast of a gaming PC? Here's what I've learned.

Frame-generation is killer tech

When you start gaming on a 50-series card, especially if you're trying out recent releases like Doom: The Dark Ages or Oblivion Remastered, the huge feature that you're getting access to is Nvidia's latest frame generation version.

This killer tech lets your graphics card use the information on-screen to actually generate new frames and insert them in between real frames, potentially bumping your frame rate up by big margins. There are people out there who say that it brings blurriness with them, and that may have been true on slightly older cards, but the 50-series cards make big improvements.

I've left it on for all my gaming, and I'm not looking back – it really does feel like free extra performance at this stage, and even on a 4K 27-inch monitor, which I typically use, I've not been able to spot any downsides visually.

Ultrawide possibilities

Speaking of monitor, I just had a two-week spell testing out a fairly staggering 39-inch ultrawide OLED from LG (the 39GX9), for a forthcoming review. I won't spoil my verdict, but it's been a fairly eye-opening experience, underlining just how crazy ultrawide gaming can be.

That's something the PS5 Pro can't really match, with no native or specific support for ultrawide resolutions, meaning compromises would be needed. On PC, though, I enjoyed some staggering views in The Dark Ages and Expedition 33, both of which scale to 21:9 without any issues at all.

It's a totally different way to game, with your peripheral vision suddenly becoming part of the equation, and scenes that stretch out hugely in front of you. I'm still a little unsure about the huge amount of space taken up on my desk (which clearly isn't big enough for the monitor in question), but it's another element that feels like a huge upgrade.

Settings menus do get old eventually

The boon of PC gaming is the unreal performance you can unlock with a powerful rig, as well as the wider range of available games, with many titles coming first to PC before success enables them to unlock console ports. Still, I'd be remiss if I pretended there were absolutely no downsides to making the switch.

For one thing, setting up most PS5 Pro games is basically a matter of seconds. Generally, you choose between a fidelity mode or a performance mode (with the best Pro upgrades offering one unified experience that brings the best of both), then you're done.

On PC, though, things are much more involved. The first launch of a game generally means going back and forth between the menu and gameplay to figure out exactly what settings to run, how many levels of frame generation to enable and more. That's fun in its own way (especially with a PC that can default to Ultra in almost all games right now). Still, it's a little immersion-breaking, and ultimately does feel like a slight distraction from the actual point of playing games.