That, and a PC is an incredibly inefficient gaming machine. Developers squeeze more out of consoles than PCs. An RTX 4090 has 5x the TFLOPS of an Xbox Series X but maybe it's twice as good on a cross platform Windows/Xbox game.
The other side of this is that the consoles have technology far in advance of PC’s that people are unaware of because for whatever reasons they wrongly chose a long time ago to decide that GPU’s were all that matters.
As one example: the PS5 (Kraken) and XS (Velocity) have dedicated decompression and storage access hardware that allows access to the NVME without chewing up CPU cycles. This is massive for resource loading and not something that currently exists in the PC world. Even where some amalgam of it might exist soon via DirectStorage, it’ll not be ubiquitous, so it can’t be designed in to the core of PC versions of games because not everyone will have it.
This is a pretty critical difference when you see it in a game like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart or Spiderman 2. There’s no equivalent that would allow those games to be ported to PC without significant compromises. Even texture streaming is dramatically faster than on the highest end PC.
I can dig out the tests on this if anyone cares to see it, but reading from a gen 4 NVME at 7GB/s takes something north of 80% CPU usage on a 5800x if memory serves.
Talk starts at 4 minutes: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KasVMOMWM-4
Forspoken does use DS on Windows. No need to wait for the future.
Forspoken can’t base the design around instant load times, because most PCs don’t have DirectStorage over ultra-fast NVME drives. Even those that do, don’t have coprocessors to read from the drives, meaning they’re eating up massive amounts of compute to read that fast.
Not even a little bit the same as the situation on the PS5.
Yes, the PS5 has a special chip -- because it's CPU is too anemic to decompress the data that fast.
But DF has shown Forspoken to load faster with an adequate CPU + NVMe than PS5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8_HcLb4ajY
If you look at this video it makes the case better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VODSVVkKRD4
Forspoken is a game that's not built with rapid loads in mind - it's designed to work on a range of hardware that will in the worst case include spinning hard disks (or more realistically, basic SATA SSD drives). That it can load assets relatively quickly on a high end machine with DirectStorage completely misses the point - the pipeline just isn't there to load assets at a consistent fast pace like it is with the PS5 architecture (and the XS architecture).
In the example above from Rift Apart (which to the best of my knowledge is not using DirectStorage to be fair), the frame-rate dives hard on any asset loading task. DirectStorage is more efficient with this, but it still chews cycles to move the data in the absence of dedicated hardware - there's just no way around this logically, and that's the point. The developer is constrained to designing a game in a way that will work consistently across hardware.
Faster loading screens are better than slow loading screens, but they're not better than no loading screens at all. Likewise, having games introduce elevators to nowhere or tunnels of nothingness to allow assets to be loaded is not a problem that you can work around on current PC titles - it fundamentally limits how the game is designed, not just how well it performs.
The PS5 CPU is far from anaemic, and buying a really expensive CPU for a PC with double the core count to get less real-terms performance doesn't seem like a great trade-off.
Unsteady 30FPS with terrible frame pacing is nothing that consoles can brag about.
When it comes to the typical 1080p resolution target, it’s really easy to hit 60FPS with very mediocre hardware in most current AAA games without sacrificing much if any visual fidelity. Owning a PC might give you the ability to bump the resolution or turn on inefficient enhancements like ray tracing, but someone sitting on a couch playing on a 60Hz $350 Costco TV isn’t going to experience a difference.
As an example, with the Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty benchmark, you’ll hit 60FPS average at 1080p Ultra settings (ray tracing off) with previous-generation mid-range hardware like the RTX 3060 or RX 6600. And of course this is without doing a single bit of console-specific optimization.
Shooter and esports examples like Call of Duty and Overwatch 2 are designed to be frame rate optimized and easily deliver a 120fps experience on modern consoles.
What consoles can do beautifully is give you a solid 75-100% of the “graphical fidelity to the casual observer” while being far weaker than a more expensive PC.
The console market isn’t really like the early 2000s where a crunchy 30fps was a more common expectation.
There are no compatibility concerns with refresh rates:fps. And there are TVs but more importantly monitors that exceed 120hz.
COD doesn’t reach a steady 120 fps on consoles — a VRR display is helpful with the fps dips as low as 60 fps.