Consoles are essentially PCs locked down to gaming but they still have their own APIs and have very few hardware variations. Games can be optimised for the handful of different consoles in ways that just aren’t possible with the thousands of combinations of PC components.
One good example from current gen is the shared RAM between CPU and GPU in the PS5. That doesn’t really exist in the PC world (yet), even in systems with “shared VRAM” (in those PC setups, the GPU just gets a chunk of regular non-VRAM that the CPU will no longer access until the GPU gives it up). In the PS5 it’s implemented as a way to eliminate making copies of data between system RAM and VRAM, which can hypothetically be a boost to efficiency, depending on the workload. Of course it also leads to a cheaper hardware bill of materials, which was probably Sony’s primary impetus.
I think the trend for manufacturers has clearly been away from that sort of thing, though. There used to be very deep, architectural differences between PCs and consoles (anyone remember PS3’s Cell?), and for the most part, those days are over.
This argument was a really good one when consoles used to be highly specialized to play games, but new ones are just PCs with a different OS.
Consoles are essentially PCs locked down to gaming but they still have their own APIs and have very few hardware variations. Games can be optimised for the handful of different consoles in ways that just aren’t possible with the thousands of combinations of PC components.
One good example from current gen is the shared RAM between CPU and GPU in the PS5. That doesn’t really exist in the PC world (yet), even in systems with “shared VRAM” (in those PC setups, the GPU just gets a chunk of regular non-VRAM that the CPU will no longer access until the GPU gives it up). In the PS5 it’s implemented as a way to eliminate making copies of data between system RAM and VRAM, which can hypothetically be a boost to efficiency, depending on the workload. Of course it also leads to a cheaper hardware bill of materials, which was probably Sony’s primary impetus.
I think the trend for manufacturers has clearly been away from that sort of thing, though. There used to be very deep, architectural differences between PCs and consoles (anyone remember PS3’s Cell?), and for the most part, those days are over.