[zzanz]

I really do miss this old regime of utilizing the entire machine in games. There is a fantastic video of one of the original Naughty Dog developers talking about the optimizations they did for the original Crash Bandicoot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o), and some of the less conventional tricks they did to enable 3D gameplay on the PS1. I've always wondered what the true limit of performance optimizations is in games. Obviously modern systems have a lot more systems to compete and share memory between, but there have been obvious cases where performance has had low priority. Also under consideration is the constantly morphing landscape of PC hardware and software architecture. Given a fixed hardware, like the PS5 or Xbox, with the hardware of a high end gaming computer, what is the true limit a game could reach.

[hnuser123456]

I'm sure if things were super highly optimized, you could do things like run Cyberpunk 2077 at its maximum fidelity level on something like an i3/rtx 2060. But at a certain point, you're just not gonna get fully pathtraced lighting without something like RT cores, or you're gonna have to settle for something that isn't quite as photorealistic to hit 60fps.

[Flam]

Aside, may enjoy this video: https://youtu.be/Qvlb-Yo6Rqo?si=HW1TrDdcC2WQgvya

[pjmlp]

This is exactly the reason why most game studios prefer to target game consoles.

[7bit]

If that were true, then these games would only land on the particular console they decided on. But most game studios develop in either UE5 or Unity and release for all consoles and PC, so what you say sounds wrong.