If consoles are just glorified PCs now, how is it that a game designed for PS5 or X-Box Series X alone better than one that is designed to be cross platform?
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There’s a famous saying in software engineering: “Make it work, make it right, make it fast”. Optimisation is, basically, the “make it fast” step. Get all the performance you can out of it.
Some of the optimisation work is more or less universal: Do the least work possible (don’t repeat work, don’t do work you don’t need to), and be as efficient as possible with the work you do end up doing.
When you talk about “optimised for XBox/PS5” stuff, it’s a bit different. PCs come in a wide variety of hardware configurations (all sorts of graphics cards, processors, memory) so you account for all of those things. On the console front, you have only two versions of the Xbox Series X/S, and one version of the PS5. That means you can account for their precise performance characteristics.
Is your CPU sitting idle while the GPU is going full throttle while struggling to keep up? Perhaps you can move some of the work from the GPU to the CPU. Is your CPU working hard while your RAM is unused? Maybe pre-calculate a bunch of stuff and store it in RAM so you can reuse it instead of recalculating it every frame. That sort of thing.
[This talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDhKyIZd3O8) by one of the guys at Insomniac talks _a lot_ about optimisation in the Spiderman game for the PS4. It’s pretty technical, but it should still give you a good idea of what optimisation work looks like.
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