Why do consoles need significantly less hardware performance to run the same software compared to a PC ?
In: Engineering
They don’t run the same software as PCs. PCs have much more broad operating systems capable of doing much more than a console on a *much* wider range of hardware. Additionally, games that release on consoles and PC are not always the same, most games on PC have graphical settings that can be turned higher to look better than the console version, because they have more headroom on the topend of hardware that consoles don’t have.
It’s like comparing a smartphone to a dumbphone and asking “How come smartphones need better hardware when dumbphones can make phone calls just as well?”
A console is much more specialized than a PC. A PC is designed to be broad, so that it can be used for a number of things. A console is specialized, everything from hardware to software is optimized for gaming.
the console only does one thing and every console is identicle. with that, it is easier to optimise for and a dev can maximize and squeeze every last bit of performance out of the hardware. a pc can be 100′ of different configurations and is harder to optimize.
now the other poster is also correct that in many cases a pc version is better graphics wise because of the power. you may not immediately see the difference but they are there. things like sharper textures. farther draw distances and less pop ins for example.
if you would like to see a great example of this check out digital foundries – rise of the tomb raider pc vs ps4 video. the game still looks beautiful on ps but side by side you can see how much of it was changed and even effects removed so it runs at a decent framerate.
Former game developer here,
The point is that on a console, due to that guaranteed consistency (at least it used to be, now manufacturers are slowing down due to development costs, so Microsoft, for example likes to release different versions of the same console, fucking things up a bit – that’s our problem, not yours, though), video games can be optimized more aggressively. It’s hard to write an optimization that works across a broad range of processor specs, manufacturers, motherboards, memory size and specs, video cards, even what slot that card is plugged into. We could write optimizations for ALL those scenarios, but there’s only so much time and budget, and the return on investment declines at a near vertical angle, because PC hardware changes so damn fast! Not so with a console (ostensibly). We can focus our time and money and effort and know that this optimization is going to work for everyone forever across the entire platform.
Computers are made to run a wide variety of programs, so not all the power can be used for every program.
Consoles on the other hand are made to run very specific types of programs. They can use 100% of their power to run games, at the cost of needing those games to be made specifically for the console.
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