Indie dev behind photorealistic RTS about ants says a maxed-out PC "easily" costs 3 to 5 times more than a PS5 Pro, but won't "look or play 3 to 5 times better"

The developer behind a real-time strategy game about ants has been talking up how a maxed-out PC compares to the PS5 Pro. While you might spend three to five times more on the former than the latter, the current state of tech means you're unlikely to get a game that looks three to five times better on a PC than it would on a PS5 Pro.

Speaking to WCCFTech, Empire of the Ants game director Renaud Charpentier takes a question over how much of an improvement there is between the PS5 and PS5 Pro versions of the game and how the latter fares against a maxed-out PC game.

"As said and as presented by Sony, it is expected that most games will double their frame rate on the Pro or improve scene quality if they were already running in 60 on a PS5," he says. "Still, maxed-out PCs are kind of "no limit," so they will, of course, be more powerful, but you can't compare them. A maxed-out PC is going to cost easily three to five times more and consume three to five times more electrical energy.

"But what is interesting and says a lot about the flattening silicon evolution curve is that your game on your monster PC is not going to look or play 3 to 5 times better than on a PS5 Pro console. There is a huge diminishing return now on high-end silicon, and that might have an impact on the life cycle duration of console hardware."

As for the PS5 Pro's price tag, Charpentier isn't sure how expensive it truly is. The developer praises the PS5 and Xbox Series X as "incredible pieces of hardware" and says it was "impossible" to build a PC as powerful on the same budget. But, the inflation we've seen since launch means "comparing the PS5 Pro price with benchmarks and prices of decades ago doesn't seem very relevant."

"The interesting question would be how much it costs in terms of average salary percentage in each region and how much previous top-end consoles cost relative to their time," he says. "I don't know about that, but I remember that in my youth, many consoles were already considered pretty expensive by my parents and my friend's parents."

As for Empire of the Ants itself, the game is a remake of another obscure RTS we got 23 years ago, rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5 to deliver visuals photorealistic enough to make the original look further away in age than it already does. Regardless, if you play this one on PS5 Pro, you can rest assured it won't look much worse off than it would on a maxed-out PC.

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