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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Cause consoles are not “glorified PCs”. The hardware is designed specifically for “gaming tasks”. PCs doesn’t have custom controllers for reading from storage and hardware unpacking on the fly to the best ram portion, or maybe directly to the vram. Just for doing a (non technical) example.
In simple terms, optimization is just making things run better (faster, use less memory…).
In regards to your specific platform question, it means that the program (the game) is written to use some special feature of the hardware that one console has and another does not.
This isn’t just specific to consoles like Xbox or Playstation. There are features that Intel processors have that AMD processors do not. You could even optimize games for a specific Intel processor. But you don’t want to do that, since you don’t know what computer the game is going to be running on, so you want to make it so that it runs on as many as possible. This is referred to in software engineering as “portable code”. But if you know the game is going to be only running on this specific Xbox, you can optimize for it.
You could write the games in such a way that it’s optimized for multiple platforms, under specific circumstances. But that is a lot of work, and in some cases, would be hard to do without exposing the soource code and making the installation process *very* long.
ELI5 oversimplification.
For example you have a excel sheet with a 10 thousand rows. you need to find a row.
You can go at from the beginning, going over each line until you find it. Or you can create an index with important data and the line number, that index is easier to go trough than the big sheet.
This is indexing, one form of optimization. Mostly done in databases, but the principle is sound, making things easier to be accessed.
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Other thing is that it is hard to know “what comes next” when you are in the process of making. But when you are complete, you can “streamline” things, you know what comes next, what is happening now, so you can preload specific images, sounds and events instead of having everything loaded.
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Also an example for Apple devices and Apple software or gaming consoles. If you know your hardware you can use specific language while you make your program, known that to be fast on that hardware.
Making your program run on every possible hardware gives overhead on your program, since it has to “translate” to different hardwares.
1. Games are made on a deadline. So you only have a certain amount of time to make/polish/ship the game.
2. You have a limited budget, so you only have a certain amount of people hired to complete step 1.
3. When you make the game cross-platform, you need to devote more of your limited resources (time+people) to two separate versions of the game.
4. This results in less time/effort put into optimizing the game if there are multiple versions.
5. Hardware differences matter. If you have a Xbox One and Xbox Series X versions of a game, the “One” version needs to run well off a harddrive, vs. the Series X’s SSD. These each require their own optimizations that are different, and the hard drive version will always be slower due to the slower hardware.
6. PCs have a BROAD range of hardware in them, and you have to support a lot of it, so thats a lot more complex optimizations over a Xbox Series X, which has just one configuration.
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