Why do consoles need significantly less hardware performance to run the same software compared to a PC ?
In: Engineering
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.
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