How can a $399 console be so amazing at achieving 4K/120 when a PC build requires significant more budget to match the same specs?
In: Technology
Because consoles are sold at a loss, knowing that they’ll make the money back in game sales.
My 3090 can’t even do 4k 120hz on any game worth a shit. You think a console that draws less power than just my graphics card can max games out at 4k 120? Okay kid.
If you build a computer yourself, every single part is a separate product that needs to make some profit for the company manufacturing it.
Game consoles are made by one company often at-cost or sometimes at a loss because they make profit from the games/subscription services. Furthermore, each console has exactly one of each part so you don’t run into stock issues when building your own system. Lower stock often means paying more (see GPUs these days).
Because consoles fake it a lot. From the average distance from your TV to your couch you’re not going to notice artifacts of upscaling/dithering. Not to mention, consoles are sold at a loss, but because you have to buy games from Sony or Microsoft somewhere along the pipeline they can get that money later on. Plus subscriptions for online help to further get your money later on.
I think whoever told you the ps5 could run games at 4k/120fps lied to you. Or you missed the * where it says its upscaling 1080p
What console games are 4K/120?
A couple of people have mentioned that the console business model is to make the money on content, like printers make their money on ink. The other factor is economy of scale, PC makers are building a lot of different models but the total volume for each is less than the model of a console. They build every console exactly the same, so the overall cost is significantly lower than it would be for a similarly configured PC.
Finally, the comparison is skewed because the console/TV combo isn’t really performing at the same level of visual clarity that a PC & gaming monitor are.
Consoles aren’t sold at at a profit, companies frequently take losses on them and make it up with game licensing and peripherals, etc.
Also dunno if this is still true but back in the old days games meant for consoles were designed specifically for that hardware, while PC games had to be designed to run on a variety of configurations, which leads to some inefficiency.
Consoles cheat and set lower targets
When games are made for consoles you know exactly what hardware you’re running on and can optimize for that. Games will dynamically drop background textures in busier areas to free up GPU time for the parts that need to look nice. Smoke and particle effects will also be scaled to the hardware so it doesn’t cause a critical performance problem.
With PC games you’re dealing with a huge variety of hardware configurations and its up to the user to set what works for their system. If they request high quality textures then use high quality textures regardless of if an area might bog down with lower end GPUs, you don’t know what they have.
For the most part though, console games aren’t running all games at 4k 120 fps. The complete list of 120 fps games for the PS5 is 10 games long, that’s it, and its questionable if they’ll run at 120 fps *all* the time or just *most of* the time
In addition to the lower hardware costs, a console can usually achieve better performance for its hardware capabilities due to its architecture being designed exclusively for games.
As a developer, you can be guaranteed that every console is identical. Exploits, direct memory access, etc, can be replicated safely, squeezing better performance from less hardware.
This can never be guaranteed on a PC. Plus there are always additional services running in the background.
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