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Bofferbrauer on 09 April 2016
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sc94597 said:
Bofferbrauer said:

Bear in mind that developers need time to figure out how to squeeze out the performance out of the consoles. The games of the first 1-2 years generally don't dive too much into this as they haven't figured it out totally yet. It's also visible in the video to a point: The closer to the release of the video the games came, the more the Pentium experienced troubles and framedrops. The i3 was still unaffected at the point the video was made, but that doesn't mean that this year's blockbusters will run as fine again on the i3.

The main problem of the consoles hardware-wise is the CPU. The Jaguar was meant for Ultrathins (Ultrabook is trademarked by Intel, so AMD has to name theirs Ultrathin) and sacrificed performance for low power consumption. Add to this it's very low clock speed and you get a pretty bad choice for a Console CPU. I'm pretty sure the GPU needs to help out on some CPU calculations, which is pretty bad performance-wise. If the developers can figure out how to get past this problem I don't think i3+750Ti will be able to keep up as easely as before

Again, this is even less true today. With how developed game-engines are, as well as consoles finally using X86 we aren't going to see huge performance gains. In fact, we've been seeing the opposite. Image-quality and frame-rates have been decreasing with every new game. Just look at Final Fantasy XV for example. According to your hypothesis, FInal Fantasy XV should look how it does (in terms of graphical fidelity) and still maintain the 1080p 30fps resolutions that early games entailed. 

The Pentium was limited by the number of threads it had. If the games were developed with two threads in mind, it wouldn't be a problem. Furthermore, the PS4/XBO's Jaguar is many times less powerful than an i3. No amount of optimization will bridge that gap (if the game is CPU- bound, which is rare these days.) 

True, the i3 is much more powerful. But it has only up to 4 threads, a game optimized to make full use of 8 threads could still run better on the jaguar. But the point was that the GPU has to help the CPU, thus using some of it's power to do something other than graphics, which is unefficient at best. If the GPU wouldn't need to do that anymore for one reason or another, the i3/750Ti combination might fall back again, this time due the GPU being to weak compared to the one in the PS4.

But as you pointed out, this is hypothetical, it doesn't have to be true this gen. Especially not with DX12 and Vulkan, giving PC also a low level API and freeing up the overhead