I swapped my PS5 Pro for a top-end Nvidia RTX 5070 rig – and I'm not sure I can go back

You wouldn't know it to look at how I've gamed for the past decade, but I grew up as a dedicated PC gamer – right down to the magazine subscriptions and a desperation to upgrade components I could absolutely not afford to swap. I had a deeply mediocre computer housed in a bleak grey plastic Dell shell, and I pushed it to its limit for years.

Now, though, I'm more than 10 years into mainlining console gaming, from the Xbox One to the PS4 and eventually the PS5 Pro – none of them as cheap as chips, but all of them the option I could afford at the time. A high-end gaming PC has always been out of reach, but Nvidia has provided one to T3 so that I can check out just what I've been missing out on.

It's kitted out with a GeForce RTX 5070 card, the star of the rig and a component that costs close to a PS5 Pro on its own, but which can unlock some pretty stellar new features. So, at least for now, I've ditched my PS5 Pro (for all that games have recently been wowing me on it) to hit up the Steam library I've neglected for so long. With a little over a week under my belt, I'm finding it hard to find any downsides.

Frankly, since the last time I really paid attention to it, even the Windows setup process has become quicker and easier than it used to be, although the mammoth size of games has made for some long waits while titles download. Still, I've managed to get into a couple of games that I also have access to on my PS5 Pro for comparison's sake.

The first big one has been Call of Duty: Warzone, a chunky beast that I've poured over a thousand hours into over the last five years. It's in the midst of a renaissance thanks to the return of its original Verdansk map, and performance on PS5 Pro is pretty solid, running smoothly with a 120fps mode.

Still, booting it up on PC (connected to a 4K monitor that can also support 120Hz output, something I thankfully already owned), the game is a whole different proposition. Textures are sharper on the highest settings, the lighting feels better and, most importantly, the responsiveness is off the charts. I don't have to compromise on any settings at all to enjoy a frame rate that can soar way beyond that 120fps mark, even in moments of high strain.

Over the Easter weekend, I was checking out what I could grab through PC Game Pass, and Avowed jumped out to me – a game I actually cannot play on PS5 Pro, since it's only on Xbox and PC right now. I'd previously loaded it up on the compact but impressive Asus ROG Flow Z13 tablet and been slightly disappointed by how it performed on that integrated GPU, but that's far from how it felt on this 5070 rig.

On the highest settings, playing at full 4K resolution, I was able to enjoy extremely impressive frame rates – really smooth 60fps performance natively, but with the 5070's frame generation capabilities, this almost doubled in most situations.

That made it incredibly easy to play 25 hours of the game over a long weekend. Frankly, that's the sort of bingeing I haven't yet done on my PS5 Pro at all, and the superb performance definitely had a part to play there. Having absolutely nothing to do all weekend might have been a factor too, of course.

Still, I have a feeling that the real binge is just about to start. I'm an absolutely enormous fan of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – it's the only game I have a tattoo of, and I played hundreds of hours in my teens. So, now that its glossy remaster has been shadow-dropped, I'm planning to live in its world as much as I can (real life permitting).

I haven't yet had a chance to play it properly, but booting it up on my PS5 Pro, I was impressed by how it looked – but a little let down that its "Quality" mode brought things down to a choppy-feeling 30fps, while its "Performance" option felt smoother but didn't have an option for variable refresh rate displays.

I've also downloaded it on PC, though, and with this 5070 powering things, I'm looking at a far rosier situation. Dropping the resolution to a still very sharp 1440p, I can run the game on Ultra settings across the board and get high frame rates in the starting dungeon – while bumping things up to 4K still leaves me hovering around 60fps to outmatch the PS5 Pro with more impressive settings.

Turn on frame generation, though, and things get even more impressive once again, with a big boost to smoothness that doesn't come with much of a compromise in terms of image quality and sharpness. I would definitely have put myself down as a sceptic of frame generation in private just a couple of weeks ago, but being able to sit and experiment with it has won me over by a wide margin already.

I can't bring myself to turn on my PS5 Pro now unless it's for social gaming with friends who don't have PCs to use – and that's something that I haven't been able to say in years. Time will tell if I've been permanently won back to the world of PC gaming, but my first taste of the 50-series has been unbelievably impressive.