We matched PC graphics settings to a PlayStation 5's graphics and then benchmarked PC hardware until we found a match to the PS5's framerate (FPS) performance.
First, as stated in the conclusion, there's a place for both PCs and consoles and it's not as simple as a price-for-price comparison. Still, as an exercise in understanding the graphics capabilities of a modern game console (the PlayStation 5 was used here), we set forth on matching the Sony PlayStation 5's graphics settings against a PC, the latter of which has individual controls for various in-game options. Once we matched the settings to be roughly equal, we ran benchmarks against GPUs (and one CPU) until we found a performance threshold roughly equal to the average FPS / frametime performance of the PlayStation 5. This gives us a relatively like-for-like comparison to better understand what the PS5 is comparable to -- it's about a GTX 1060, 1070, and 1080, depending on game, when not running ray tracing. Ray tracing would be something we need to test once more games support it on the consoles. Testing includes a grouping of three games, but the overall concept extrapolates to other games as well. We've established a range of performance to estimate rasterization performance at equal graphics quality (roughly) between the devices. Again, we think the PlayStation 5 and other consoles fill an important role in the market that can't be simply replaced by a PC, and likewise, a PC offers a lot of extensibility not given by a console. They both have an important place and thus this is more of an academic exercise in determining the performance and quality equivalence.
