Why can games from the end of a console’s lifespan be better than one from the beginning on the same hardware?

Question

Why is it the games from the end of a video game console’s lifespan can be superior graphically and performance wise to games from the start of the console generation, even if they can both be run on the exact same hardware?

In: 4

Answer 1

Something no-one’s said yet is that games early on in a console’s life are often cross-gen, so they have to be able to run on last gen. We’ve seen a lot of PS5 and Xbox Series X games be essentially nerfed because they had to run on PS4 and Xbox One too. Later on in the gen, they don’t have to.