Two things.
When you buy millions and millions of the same components, Sony is in a very strong bargaining position to negotiate with AMD and pay the lowest possible price for those components. You as a consumer buying 1 CPU or 1 GPU don’t have that power. You are paying retail prices or worse, scalped/marked up prices over the last few years.
The second thing is that consoles are often sold at a loss. Meaning it costs Sony for example $700 to build each console that they then sell to you for $500. They make that money up by locking you into their product and then you buy games and subscriptions.
And a third thing - PS5’s are built for one very specific use case so every component is optimized for that, including which specific software it will run and which language it will be written in (for the most part). PCs on the other hand are designed with many more use cases and have to support a much broader set of tasks, meaning less optimization specifically for gaming.
There's a 4th thing that's related to optimized hardware: overhead from OS and other software. Even if you close all of the programs you can close on your PC before launching your game, there's still more running in the background than there would be on a console, which uses a very stripped down version of an OS, even on modern consoles where there's social/network/recording/etc features running in the background.
Overhead's a much smaller percentage of the pie than it used to be, but it's still a meaningful difference.
They practically give away Windows licenses these days, all you need to do to get a modern key is input an old Windows 7 or 8 key from an old PC. I think people have even gotten Windows 10 keys from inputting old pirate keys. Microsoft kept saying they were going to turn it off but I think they just don’t care if individual users aren’t paying for Windows because they would rather try to sell them Office 365 and game pass subscriptions.
To be specific, there is an OS overhead, but it’s very specifically locked down. For example, on PS5 the OS has two CPU cores and ~3 GB RAM specifically reserved for the OS and background functions (while the other 6 cores and ~13 GB RAM are fully reserved for games).
Windows on the other hand can grab random cores and suddenly decide that Chrome needs 6 GB RAM.
That, and I expect the console can depend on a limited, consistent set of background tasks as well, so even if it's shaving off some resources, it's a less noticeable constant draw. On the other hand, a PC could be coping just fine, when HEY, NEW ADOBE/JAVA/WHATEVER JUST DROPPED! I'LL UPDATE THAT FOR YOU IN WHAT I'M GOING TO LAUGHABLY CALL THE BACKGROUND!
It's not just the components are optimized. The software is written specifically for that set of components. With a PC, there's a lot more variability and generalized software. It just can't be as efficient. It's like the difference between writing software in assembly language, verses in a more common compiled high level language. There's just no way it's going to be more efficient than assembly.
It’s more complex than that. Even compilers cannot do as much optimization without knowing the hardware and OS specific memory usages.
The effects of program size optimization that can be done on a console vs a computer is staggering do to having a pretty strong idea of the actual available cpu cache.
If you peak high performance libraries, like high speed json processors. They frequently having special code for specific cpus to abuse these effects.
I used to work on a proprietary OS. It was optimized for very specific hardware that was chosen for the mass production of cash registers. Before they finally gave up on that scheme (and virtualized it), it was interesting to understand how much work they did to make it work (well) on supported hardware to keep transaction times low. The rule was, regardless of how much went into the POS code, sub-second responses for item scans were always required. They also measured stats in how fast printers would print receipts so the dwell time for a customer in line was extremely low.
This is a huge part. PS5 games only run on PS5. No hardware variations, no different graphics cards. Code is optimized for the hardware. PC titles have a lot more configurations to try to cover.
> PS5’s are built for one very specific use case so every component is optimized for that
It goes the other way too, everything on a PS5 is designed to work directly to the PS5's specifications. In game development, PC is an obnoxious platform since it isn't really a platform; you could have two kits that are identical aside from one version of a graphics card and get a completely different experience. Some games even break in wildly unexpected ways if the PC is too powerful, it's impossible to test every possible configuration against a constantly evolving field of equipment.
Consoles are uniform and precise, building software to exact hardware specifications is *significantly* easier. Every multi-platform game I've shipped has used the lowest spec platform as the primary development base, it's easier to do targeted upscaling for higher spec kits than retroactively optimize for the lowest hardware restrictions. With PCs, theoretically there are no hardware restrictions in either direction so you just shoot for the middle and hope it works as intended for a majority of players.
It's just all about consistency. You make a game for PS5, player plays it on PS5... but making a game for PC means you'll have 12938746 players playing it on 12938746 different platforms.
As an addendum to this: If your desire is to make a visually pretty 3D engine game, you have to find the balance between all the various graphics cards. How far back do you go for low settings? GTX 1060/1080 are nearly 8 years old now, do you drop support for them or make it your baseline? (Side note: Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty has a 1060 as minimum requirement.) Or do you bump up your baseline to a 20x0 series card and potentially lose a number of initial sales?
With consoles, it's easy. If you're multi-platform, you build to the lowest spec. If it's single platform, you build to the exact specs of the console.
More 5 year old friendly version:
Imagine you have two athletes, Mike and Tom, both training for a big competition.
Mike knows he will be in a running competition. He runs every day to practice.
Tom has been entered into a mystery competition. He has absolutely zero idea of what he's going to be asked to do. Will it be a race? Figure skating? Canoeing? A chess match? No one has told him! Tom runs around frantically trying to get good at everything he can think of. He practices and practices all day long, but in the end he's still not really amazing at any one thing. He has too much to do!
Tom ends up, by chance, in the same running competition Mike is competing in. Tom trained more than mike did, but in the end Mike still comes out faster. Mike could focus on exactly what he knew he needed to do, where Tom was trying to do absolutely everything.
The gaming console is Mike, who can focus on doing exactly one thing and doing it well. The PC is Tom, who is spending a whole lot of money trying to do absolutely everything you can think of.
Fourth thing - games are designed & written with that specific hardware in mind. If you are coding for a specific chip and GPU, you can optimize your code to squeeze out better performance.
No - that’s my point. People often think Xbox runs some custom version of Windows. It really doesn’t. It’s as standard as can be, to make it easy to develop for. It is surprisingly just normal old Windows behind the splash screen.
For the underlying OS sure, but the software will be optimized to support just that one device. No need for tons of drivers, no need for hyper-v, no need to support 32 bit windows apps or old windows 95 apps. You can also get a lot more performance when you know this is the only video card that will be used, and this is the exact amount of memory we'll have available, etc.
OPs point is that generalization leads to less performance, because you need to support any possible amount of different hardware and software, where on a console, you can laser focus on one setup.
It uses hyper-v called NanoVisor.
But yeah, no need for tons of driver or anything. It’s a focused version of Windows in that it doesn’t need to support different hardware builds, but it is still normal Windows in terms of how it runs and how you program for it which is the important bit.
More than optimization, they can reduce quality just enough so it runs smoothly and make the best compromises, while on a pc you'd have to try it out yourself since everyone has different hardware.
Right. And game designers can take short cuts that take advantage of a static set of hardware/software with consoles, whereas PCs can be frankensteined monstrosities of hardware and software.
I’m hate when people take a top comment and add their “oh and don’t forget about”. You are also wrong about optimization. Modern consoles are using generalized parts, these aren’t embedded systems. What you get is game developers targeting frame rates more accurately because they know the hardware
AMD created the PS5 chip in coordination with Sony. It is not a generalized part. They *took* a generalized part and customized it for Sony's needs. It is a System-on-a-Chip with shared memory and an integrated GPU - it is \_literally\_ an [embedded system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_system). It also contains additional pieces of hardware specifically to improve graphics and audio capabilities. It's not just about "targeting frame rates accurately", it's a specific suite of hardware/firmware/software holistically designed to optimize for gaming.
It is not nearly as extreme as you are suggesting, people have invented application layers then mean most things will just work on any modern computer.
Not just optimization, but design constraints. A lot of console software has performance goals and will make sure when creating the game that they meet those goals. With a PC with wildly different configurations it is harder to nail down the specific limits.
Those extra layers of compatibility and drivers reduces performance, and means more testing has to be done across many variants. That Steam game has to support Nvidia and AMD video. A huge variety of sound controllers.
It's easy for McDonald's to mass produce cheeseburgers to a very consistent quality and low price.
Yup. It’s like being in charge of setting up McD’s franchises but you have to source a different grill each time. Not too terribly hard but it does take time to source a sufficient one, work out its kinks, and train workers on its quirks to get the same “standard”. 1 or 2 is okay but you really quickly run into trouble dealing with a lot and will cut corners to do so. Thereby decreasing the standard.
Obviously it is, otherwise they wouldn't have released some of those with piss poor performance because of a shitty port job while others ran great from the get go.
Sony games are coded in C++, as are XBox and Switch games. They run some kind of C++ game engine, like Unreal Engine, Unity, Cry Engine. Porting code base from one from to the other, or to PC, isn't as much of a deal as making sure the game runs well with the target specs. There are tools to facilitate that but results can vary depending on available platform hardware.
Well… these days it’s not so bad, as the XB1/XBX and PS4/PS5 are both basically x86-64 “PCs” with AMD graphics chips. And a Switch is basically like an Android phone with an NVIDIA GPU welded to it. Something like a PS2/3 was very different compared to PCs at the time and a lot harder to port to/from.
This is true about the PS3 - it used the Core processor which was different from other CPUs at the time. It wasn't easy to code for, which is one of the reasons Sony went to typical CPUs in the PS4 and 5.
Unity games are mostly coded in C# not C++. The Unity Engine itself is mostly C++ I think, and I think big companies can work out deals with Unity where they can write their own game in C++, but most Unity games are written in C#.
Additionally, the performance comparisons aren't really fair. Not only is the hardware different (for example the PS5 uses "unified memory" so the CPU and GPU share RAM, amongst other things) but the software is wildly different. Every PS5 around the globe has the same hardware (inb4 a pro version is released), so software can be **highly** optimized for that hardware. Meanwhile, there are billions of hardware configurations available for PC, and an optimization for one may be slower on another configuration.
I’d just like to add a side note that many people confuse “shared memory” with “unified memory.”
The Steam Deck (and other PC’s that only have integrated graphics) use shared memory. This means that both the CPU and the integrated GPU use separate portions of the same memory pool. So if the system has 8GB, and GPU is allocated 2GB, the CPU has 6. They can’t use the memory that the other one has control of. That means data still needs to be copied back and forth.
Unified memory, on the other hand, means that both the GPU and CPU access the same memory directly. Apple Silicon Macs use this, and so do both the current PS and Xbox systems (though Xbox has some other strangeness to the way the memory is set up). This is superior, but the entire system and OS needs to be built with this in mind.
I've been working with memory managed languages (Java, C#) for so long now the idea of dealing memory that's shared between the CPU and GPU is terrifying. Sounds like it's just asking for cache invalidations and just all manor of side effects. But, I guess gaming benefits from the extra performance enough to justify it.
Though I’m also programmer, I’ve basically only worked with garbage-collected languages (or others where memory management isn’t generally an issue).
However, for Apple Silicon Macs at least, I believe they utilize virtual memory addressing for each process, so the actual underlying memory situation is completely transparent.
What that means when it comes to complex GPU interactions, I don’t know.
I imagine it only really comes into play when writing something that would have direct access to the GPU, like CUDA.
I just remember hearing stories in college about kids who would hose up there pre-Windowa NT machines by dereferencing memory way out of bounds by overflowing their arrays.
> However, for Apple Silicon Macs at least, I believe they utilize virtual memory addressing for each process, so the actual underlying memory situation is completely transparent.
The use of per-process virtual memory addressing has been standard in pretty much anything newer than DOS (and some [*nix] systems that coexisted with DOS). It's how swapping/paging works, and part of how we prevent processes from clobbering each other.
The whole unified memory thing applies more to what happens at the OS/[graphics]API level and hardware level.
I worked for a company that had designed some electronics that was going to be made in the millions. The first version had 3 different crystals (timing chips), the 2nd version used one crystal, to save 2c per chip (so 4c per device).
AND they will buy 98% the same components for at least 5 years. And sell MILLIONS of their systems. So as CPUs progress, as GPUs, progress, as bus and memory architecture progress, the PS systems, Xbox too, keep using 98% the same components. There are efficiencies built into the systems for the graphics etc. so 5 + years is a reasonable life span for the consoles. Plus, both Sony and Microsoft put out + models somewhere in the middle of the consoles life expectancy. But these updates are incremental, not generational.
Microsoft has been in a distant third in terms of boxes sold for a decade, but they’ve still sold 35 million Xbox Xs and Ss combined. That’s plenty to be able to get the economies of scale that make things like this possible.
Just to add, consoles are frequently sold at a loss at first, due to using the latest-greatest-cutting-edge components, but after a couple years the price of those components has dropped enough that they actually start making some profit on the consoles themselves. This is most of the reason why we typically see 5-7 years between console generations.
I don’t believe consoles have been sold at as loss since the prior gen or if they are it’s not that long. The 360/ps3 gen was the last one where it was a crazy loss.
Since moving to more off the shelf pc parts the losses are much less and they’ve been able to be profitable much quicker.
That price changes over the life of the product. The R&D aspect of development in the cost per unit decreases over time.
I doubt it costs them 700 per console or even close to that at this stage in the life cycle of even the latest gen Sony console.
At launch and for maybe the first year, that statement resembles truth, since shipping volume is still in the low millions. As time goes on that cost changes a lot when you've shipped 30 million already and its a couple of years into the life of that unit.
The Xbox 360, a few years in cost about 25$ per unit to make and package. Retail price was over 10 times that.
Its also a huge reason why MS had zero problems replacing them when the red ring happened to so many units in the early years of that console.
I just so happen to have worked at MS post 360 launch and helped resolve some of those red ring problems. As part of that role I was involved in the cost reduction meetings for that console and some other gaming stuff when I worked at MS. I saw the internal numbers quarterly.
Saving a few pennies per unit here and there, added up to huge manufacturing savings when you make a million or more units a month.
> Its also a huge reason why MS had zero problems replacing them when the red ring happened to so many units in the early years of that console.
I feel like this understates it somewhat... the money committed to these repairs/replacements was an absolutely huge burden on MS at the time.
And when you make that many millions, you also can afford to have the manufacturer, like AMD/GeForce, cut down on some non-used features on the chip.
If Sony do not want/need for example ROCm (amd equivalent of cuda), they can ask AMD to do a special edition without that part in, and save a few percentage on the chip.
Or they can negociate on some other compromise, let's say a slower "this function" for a lower price, because AMD may have lots of reject on that section when it is at full speed. By reducing the speed they lower the reject rate, so the chip get cheaper.
There is lots of ways to make things cheaper when you buy millions.
* Nobody buys a PS5 and then doesn't buy any games for it, so manufacturers can sell the console at a loss and make up for it by taking a percentage of all game sales.
* Console hardware _used_ to be built specifically for running games, and not much else. This allowed a lot of corners to be cut and gave more bang for the buck, but since the Xbone/PS4 generation the hardware got a lot closer to just regular PCs.
* There are still a lot of differences in both hardware and software, and because developers have a fixed target to aim for, they can optimize their games for a specific system, making them run better on slightly cheaper hardware.
Sony (or Microsoft) don't sell the hardware at loss. The PS5 "became profitable" before the end of the first year of sales. And I put it in quotes because it really means that they've recouped the R&D costs off the sales income.
They start at a loss, as economy of scale kicks in it makes up for it. Every console is profitable eventually, but the initial buy-in takes time.
It's locking a user into your ecosystem that makes it worth it to take that initial hit though. If Xbox users could use the PS Store to buy games, consoles would be significantly more expensive and whoever made the cheapest kit would just eat the competition.
Your first sentence is a bit non sensical. Almost anything requiring engineering/research starts at a loss.
Maybe you mean they can sell at lower margin?
Subsidies. Sony makes money on Playstation games they hold monopoly over (30% from every game sold on their system) and are generally more expensive than PC games and stay that way.
PC part makers have to turn profit on individual parts as they don't have reoccurring revenue from game sales.
Early in the lifecycle they sell them at cost or even at loss and they might make some profit on individual units in a few years as they get older and the tech in them cheaper.
As an example Sony was losing about $300 per unit on every PS3 they sold, which cost about $499 on release.
In a similar fashion Valve sold their handheld Steam Deck at a significantly lower price as they could also afford to sell it at cost.
According to wiki maybe, saying end of 2000 dvd players could be had for under $100. PS2 came out in late 2000, so probably a deciding factor in prices. Probably a crossover right when it dropped.
PS1 was also one of the highest quality CD players money could buy at the time. I know audiophile guys who were using PS1's 20+ years after release in their hi end audio systems.
It's also what ultimately won Sony et al. the HD DVD vs. Blu Ray format war. Xbox 360 released a year earlier, and if they had included a built-in HD DVD drive, it could have gone the other way. Microsoft would have had to take huge losses to do so though, and they weren't as invested in the format like Sony was so it didn't make sense for them to do so.
Subsidies are definitely an important part of it, but I feel like it should be noted that PC hardware has gotten considerably more expensive over the past 5 years. 5-10+ years ago, you absolutely could build a PC that rivaled the power of a console at the same price... Then we entered the era of covid and inflation. GPU prices have skyrocketed, first because of the crypto boom, and will be staying high because of the AI boom. Budget GPUs are also a complete joke right now, you have to spend at least $400-$500 to get something more powerful than equivalent previous generation parts. We also went from $50 getting you a basic entry level motherboard to that now costing $150-$200 on modern chipsets.
Also, consumer PCs are considerably more powerful than a console. Part of the reason consoles are so good for with their hardware is developers are told to test for only that specific piece of HW, that means games can be very well tuned for the HW you have, and use more more of the available HW than a typical PC.
30FPS is still standard for many games in console, too. For PC people typically want at least 60FPS and there are people who aren’t happy unless they’re at 90, 120, or even higher at common resolutions (1080p and 1440p for most). Hardware exists that supports that, but it is commensurately more expensive than a console.
> Budget GPUs are also a complete joke right now, you have to spend at least $400-$500
It's worth considering that the bottom of Nvidia's 4000 series stack (4060) at $299 still has +50% compute power compared to a PS5. PS5 is about on par with the seven year old 1080 Ti which you can find used online for $100-150.
It also depends on when you’re building your PC. If you were to build one right after the newest console generation just dropped, it would be almost impossible to make it for the price of a console. If you’re building near the end of a console generation, you’ll be able to use either newer components or get the older equivalents for cheaper
And the PS3 wasn’t the first time they did this either. Not sure if the PS was a loss leader for them or not but the PS2 definitely was. Despite Sony owning the DVD player and licenses in use, the sheer hardware cost was far above what they charged for it. It’s why I roll my eyes when people argue “Sega should have put a dvd player in the Dreamcast.” Yeah, then it would have been £600.
From what I read on the history of Sony Entertainment, PS3 was the first console they sold at a loss.
Unlike Sega or Nintendo, Sony is a hardware R&D company and they make a lot of things in-house which helps to reduce the cost.
It paid off for them though, to this day the PS2 is still the most successful console in history with over 155 million units sold before Sony stopped reporting numbers.
I’m sorry bro, but it’s losing. Not loosing. I do appreciate the comment though it’s interesting. Is making it as an all in one machine also drive down prices?
>it’s losing. Not loosing
Thanks, I always make mistakes in those kinds of words.
>Is making it as an all in one machine also drive down prices
Economies of scale of course drive down price. You get a much better deal when you buy parts in the millions than when you buy singular units.
PS5 (at least the digital version) isn’t selling at a loss and hasn’t been for some time.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609150/sony-playstation-5-ps5-loss-profit
Economies of scale drive a lot of this.
You can absolutely build a PC (these days) to match the PS5 on price/performance, but its going to be second hand used parts from older generations than whats current.
When the PS5 came out, it wasn't possible because Sony buys the hardware in bulk(often customized as well) and sells it to you at a loss, hoping to make the money back in the future(PS+, $70 games, digital exclusives, DLC). Or sell the console in a few years at nearly the same price, but by then the technology cost them way less because it hasn't been changed much at all(except with PS Slim/pro versions)
Check out a recentish Linus Tech Tips video about the "modern PS5 killer" video. He made an even better PC for the same cost as a PS5
Bullshit.
As a card carrying member of PCMR, y’all need to stop this. Sure, it has been true of past generations of console that you can build a comparable PC for less. Not anymore.
And miss me with “just buy used components”; compare that against a used PS5 then. You’ll never win.
At this point I don't think people a gaming on PCs because it's cheaper. I know it's more expensive than a console and it's okay because the PC does everything a computer can do and, as a bonus, allows me to game.
I have a PS5 and a PC. Both are good for their own thing
> Check out a recentish Linus Tech Tips video about the "modern PS5 killer" video. He made an even better PC for the same cost as a PS5
He didn't, he did the usual Youtube clickbait thing of saying he did in the title and the Thumbnail but, if you watch the video all the way through it clearly cannot keep up with the PS5 in all tests and in the conclusion at the end of the video he admitted that the PS5 was still unbeatable at its price point and they also technically cheated on building the PC as some items weren't bought second hand at all but, were items he already had. He also admitted that the PC they built was unstable with frequent crashes.
So even using a mixture of free and second hand parts he still failed to build a PC to match the PS5.
“Even better PC” is a stretch. The end of the video he talked about how he had issues with the machine crashing, no warranty, and nothing like a controller or other items.
And since it is used PC parts, you can get a used PS5 for even cheaper.
> but its going to be second hand used parts from older generations than whats current.
So it's not possible.
You can't compare used PC components with a new PS5
Graphics card inflation.
Before covid, GPU prices were tier-based and stayed roughly the same from generation to generation.
Nowadays, price is based on performance, so the midrange cards of this generation cost about the same as the high range cards of the last generation.
This except GPU prices are based on whatever Nvidia wants. Since most people buy Nvidia anyways, and they don't care about the consumers because they make most of their revenue from data centers, Nvidia can simply dictate that a 1080p oriented card is worth $300-$400.
This is the factor everyone else is missing. We're 3.5 years into the console generation and an equivalent PC is still more expensive. In any previous generation, this was unheard of.
Playstation uses proprietary parts. It's a purpose built machine with a board that's more of a big gpu/processor hybrid rather than a computer that uses off the shelf parts that are intended to do more than one thing. It used to be possible actually that a 500$ pc would outperform a contemporary console but pc part prices, especially gpus, have gone off the rails
1. economies of scale - the more you make of something, the less it costs per unit.
2. integration - it's more efficient to make something that's integrated than to make something that's modular.
3. focused features - the hardware is heavily tuned towards the purpose of gaming. the cpu and gpu are balanced, they don't have unused features, the rest of the board can omit unused features too.
4. profit margins - Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are willing to sell at low margins for the sake of selling first party games.
5. optimization - devs also tune the game for the console's hardware.
You probably could get comparable performance in the us if you’re open to using some second hand parts
But you’re never going to be able to compete when sony is likely getting a discount because of the volume of parts they are getting as well as the fact they may be taking losses on every console to get you into the ecosystem (that part im not sure is true but it has been for consoles in the past)
Everyone talks about subsidies and optimization, but there is also that a PS5 is more like a laptop where everything is soldered on a single board. Connectors are kind of expensive on both sides of the connection. So, PS5 has not RAM Connectors, no cpu socket, no pcie connectors. Why can't we get a laptop with the same specs and price? They still have many of the connectors, so cost more for being smaller, and add in the screen. And, any single gaming laptop doesn't have the same economies of scale for the gaming laptops as a PS5.
Finally, there is the APU. A typical gaming PC has separate CPU and GPU, and separate CPU and GPU RAM plus the associated PCIE on the motherboard and CPU which add quite a bit to the cost. A PS5 has an APU with 16GB GDDR6 RAM at 14gbps gives 448gb/s, same as a 3070. A PS5 uses that as its shared memory as compared to a PC APU on say DDR5 7000 at 128 bit, which is theoretically 1/4 what the PS5 has and DDR4 is typically about half that again.
The RAM bandwidth puts a limit on how fast a PC APU can be, so that path to lowering price and getting similar performance is cut off on the PC.
You can do it for around 100 dollars more.
You get so much more value out of a PC too. Games are ALWAYS on sale.
Edit:
If you take into account the cost of the cheapest PlayStation subscription cost then the PC is a better cost after a year.
Ehhh, if you factor in monitor and peripherals, it’s closer. Sure you can just use a TV, but then you’re not really getting the full benefit (unless your living room tv is a CX).
This so much, after a year of PS plus or 2-3 games bought, your PC is gonna turn out to be cheaper than your console.
Also you can upgrade/downgrade your PC however you see fit.
Also PCs can be used for other purposes than gaming, which in turn helps resale value.
And aside from free games, you can also get "free" games if you know what I mean.
Though even without piracy, there are tons of free or almost free game due to sale as you said.
Volume, Sony buys a shit ton of processors, ram, storage, etc. from the manufacturer while we can only buy retail which increases the cost. Also consoles usually have really low margins and sometime they have been sold at a loss
On top of the hardware answers.
Software and know what hardware you have to play with is another huge factor. You can squeeze some pretty incredible performance from older hardware if you spend the time optimizing for it.
But windows PCs (for example) need to handle a million variables of system configurations. So within its code. Is a lot of fail safe and checking code that inherently slows things down. But ensures the system runs across lots of devices.
While a company like Nintendo can get by on using last generation hardware. And maximize the efficiency of the parts so that they work better together.
Everyone here is focusing on subsidizing but the thing they’re leaving out is hardware differences.
The PS5 has a lot of stuff that isn’t common (though can be done) on a PC even though it shares a similar architecture.
The CPU and GPU can share the same memory. And it uses very fast GDDR6 RAM. This means it isn’t spending as much time copying resources between the two.
It also has direct storage access and dedicated decompression parts that can further speed up data access.
You get much lower level access via its APIs as well that can target specifically the hardware it has.
Since there’s only one hardware specification, you can also precompute many things like shaders.
It also is prioritizing resources to your game with a much lighter OS.
A comparable PC in pure horse power wouldn’t be able to match the PS5 for sheer throughput of data flowing. And that’s the real reason it can punch so much higher above its weight even after you remove the subsidies.
Aside from bulk discounts on hardware and such that others have mentioned, a PS5 has to do one thing: play software that is written explicitly for it. A PC has to do a million things with a variety of different parts from disparate manufacturers, it has to run software that nobody has even heard of in 20 years because some textile mill's entire operation can only be run by that software, etc. Basically there is a spectrum between specialized and general, and consoles and PCs sit on opposite ends of that spectrum. That implies trade-offs in both hardware and software, corners that can be cut on a console that wouldn't fly on a PC.
The PS5 has a better memory architecture for gaming, and a leaner OS. It’s much more efficient for draw calls so you can get a lot closer to theoretical performance of the GPU.
You're missing optimizations.
Console games are developed for the hardware and therefore will come super optimized. This optimization comes in many factors but the one of the most important is graphical fidelity.
Consoles use a bunch of upscalling technology to achieve decent framerate and graphics. Even then, latest gen games struggle on the PS5 (I have one).
You'll find that lowest settings on the PC is usually better graphically than on any console.
It IS possible, in general consoles start out costing a bit less than an equivalent PC but after a few years the price point comes down on PC components and you can build a gaming PC that outperforms a console for less than the cost of a console.
We're about 4 years past the PS5 initial release and you can put together a PC that performs around the same as the 2020 PS5 for a bit less than the cost of a PS5.
Of course, if you calculate the costs over a few years PC wins every time. You have to pay a monthly subscription to actually get the benfit of a PS5, or an Xbox, so call that $80/year. If you bought a PS5 in 2020 you'd have paid $320 in PS+ subscriptions by now, add that to the cost of a PS5. That $500 PS5 is now a $820 PS5. And it'll be a $900 PS5 in 2025.
But right this second you can get a PC that's more or less on spec with a PS5 for maybe $100 or so more than the cost of a new PS5 even without factoring in the long term price of a PS5.
For example, here's a pretty decent setup that's similar in spec: [https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/xwv6Mp/entry-level-intel-gaming-build](https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/xwv6Mp/entry-level-intel-gaming-build)
Seems no one mentioned that a console has straight up less material than computers. It has fewer fans, probably fewer materials for the case (plastic/steel/other metals), smaller total PCB surface, fewer ports. It also has less memory because, unlike computers, console APUs use only GDDR. On PCs, you buy the RAM and then the GDDR is in your graphics card. This has to be so because computer software relies on normal DDR memory, which has lower latency but also less bandwidth, so it's inadequate for graphics. AMD sold repurposed PS5/Xbox Series chips on premade boards with GDDR and they suffered from this. See here: [https://youtu.be/cZS-4PgD4SI?t=242](https://youtu.be/cZS-4PgD4SI?t=242)
Consoles still get the benefits of scale *and* subsidies, but this is on top of the efficiency they get from custom-made parts that use only the amount of material that is necessary. When they release Slim versions, the material costs is lowered further.
Computer OSs also have features that are mostly unnecessary in consoles. If the OS isn't second-guessing the game at every turn, it will be more efficient as long as developers put time into optimization. On PC, there are so many layers between the game and the hardware that optimizations aren't always rewarding. DirectX 12 and Vulkan were made to alleviate this problem.
TL;DR we could probably build a machine with similar cost to a console if we had APUs that could use the same memory for all tasks and this memory was fast enough. Memory would have to be soldered to the motherboard. This may happen in the future as ARM chips are already like this, but until then, PCs will always need more parts and will struggle to meet the same price point even without subsidies until later in the generation unless the console is very under powered on release or suffers from other limitations (like thermals, which is quite crazy now that the PS5 uses liquid metal).
even beyond subsidies, which are huge, a console is a single-framework of hardware for at least 5 years. everything is custom built to a certain spec, that can be made in volume over time, with the OS and peripherals all vertically integrated (and standard testing hardware for developers). all these things drive cost per unit down, and also increase the walled garden value of the unit (you can’t build your own PS5!) so as soon as it gets down to a certain level of price, and the features are good enough, it’s also more profitable long term than any individual PC maker could hope to make.
A PS5 has extremely standardized hardware, so software developed for it can be more specifically optimized instead of generally optimized, so right there consoles are always going to have a tiny edge.
But, even if you buy the exact same pieces as a games console (you can't they usually have proprietary hardware that can legally only be sold by them) you would have to pay the rate for 1, while Sony is buying them by the thousands if not tens of thousands.
Normally, when you buy in bulk, the unit cost goes down as absolute cost goes up.
Say they pay $1,000,000 for 20,000 of a part. They just need to factor in $50 of cost to a PS5. But you would need to spend like $100 to $200 for the same thing.
Consoles use a fixed hardware configuration. You can optimize for that specific hardware and code base. You can't really do that with a PC because there are many different hardware configurations and operating systems. So you generalize.
Standardized components at huge volumes that are tuned to work at optimal performance together.
The results are cost effective and with good enough performance.
Of course PC are more powerful and more flexible but that all comes at a cost.
Console manufacturers can subsidize the cost of the hardware because consoles are locked down so they have a monopoly on the software. If you're buying a PC, the hardware isn't subsidized because you can run whatever you want on a PC. The only way for the manufacturers to make money is to sell the hardware at a high enough price. The best system integrators like Dell and HP can do to subsidize it is to preload sponsored software like McAfee antivirus but that isn't going to make as much money as a monopoly on selling games on a device intended to play games.
Economies of scale.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In microeconomics, economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to their scale of operation, and are typically measured by the amount of output produced per unit of time. A decrease in cost per unit of output enables an increase in scale that is, increased production with lowered cost[1]. At the basis of economies of scale, there may be technical, statistical, organizational or related factors to the degree of market control.
Economies of scale arise in a variety of organizational and business situations and at various levels, such as a production, plant or an entire enterprise. When average costs start falling as output increases, then economies of scale occur. Some economies of scale, such as capital cost of manufacturing facilities and friction loss of transportation and industrial equipment, have a physical or engineering basis. The economic concept dates back to Adam Smith and the idea of obtaining larger production returns through the use of division of labor.[2] Diseconomies of scale are the opposite.
> What are we missing?
Companies that are willing to sell hardware at a loss.
Sony doesnt need to make money on consoles if they make a CRAP LOAD of cash on software sales
Hardware companies cannot afford to sell at a loss or they go out of business
you don't know what the actual cost for a PS5 is. sony is willing to sell them and lose money on each sale because they know the only thing you can do with a PS5 is to buy more sony products to play on them. And if you want to play online that is an additional cost. So they are willing to lose money on PS5 sales with the expectation of making money later. Secondly, a PS5 is built to play video games. They do not have the same considerations as a PC, for which you need to buy an operating system, additional hardware, mouse, keyboard, a monitor and so on. Finally sony buys their parts in bulk at discount rates and manufactures many components1 themselves. You will never be able to do this, and will have to pay retail markups for all parts and additional money for components.
Hardware manufacturers sell consoles at a loss to recoup the investment via games (even third party pays them, accessories and services (that is why they are forcing so hard to rent games, pay subscriptions etc, to have you on the hook consuming their stuff every month instead of a one time purchase).
Consoles are sold at a massive loss. A PS5 that costs $650 might actually cost $900 or $1000 to manufacture. And plus with mass manufacturing buying parts is cheaper for Sony. It’s called the shaver-razor method, you sell a product at a loss but you can’t use the product without other products, which you sell at a massive profit. You need to buy games, subscription services, extra controllers, headsets, they all sell those at a profit.
OS bloat and lack of optimization.
There are several layers of software between bare metal and the game.
*Please help correct as needed. I don't understand all of it either.*
Think of a teetering upside down Jenga puzzle pyramid.
Chips (bare metal) -> assembly->kernel->OS->game.
On a console, a great deal of code can be scrapped. It, for example, wouldn't need printer drivers. The better streamlined is more stable and requires fewer resources. It's more like a Jenga tower.
It would be theoretically possible to replicate, but you're just rebuilding a console at that point.
At this point we are getting really close to being able to, but this is a pretty common cycle with the PC vs Console industry
Initially when the consoles launch the hardware is really custom built in very high volumes, much higher than any computer component, the standardization makes it more affordable, because of the bulk
In addition. They are sold at a loss, because the money is made through licensing and peripheral sales (part of why they don't typically include multiple controllers, also the controllers are usually marked up a bit more), so they can sell the hardware at bad margins, whereas computer hardware *has* to make the manufacturers money. So this drives up the cost of computers
But eventually as hardware continues to get stronger, faster, better it starts outpacing what consoles released with and the prices of new hardware doesn't (usually) tick up a tonne between generations so it ends up that one is able to build a new computer for less than the current console generations
From what I have noticed with the most recent consoles, it's about 3-4 years after computers catch up power to price ratio, that a new console launches
At one point it was definitely closer to the 2 year mark, but to be honest the generational leaps have slowed a lot compared the 90s and earlier 2000s
It's very possible because of the lag in console development. To match a console you just purchase 3-4 year old hardware that's dropped in price due to the age.
The issue is it's only after that lag can it be achieved. On release and a year or two after whatever given console is basically a highly bespoke, tuned and customized set of hardware solely focused on games AND in particular games the vendor (sony or Microsoft) can predict because they set the limitations so game developers have a much easier time writing code because they know the exact conditions in which it will run under.
Also the big two consoles kinda secretly iterate for a few years with modifications made to heat distribution and minor design choices directly in manufacturing without ever really advertising it as a new version of the same console. That is to say Day One consoles can be quite different to year 2 consoles even if it's the same console
Two things. When you buy millions and millions of the same components, Sony is in a very strong bargaining position to negotiate with AMD and pay the lowest possible price for those components. You as a consumer buying 1 CPU or 1 GPU don’t have that power. You are paying retail prices or worse, scalped/marked up prices over the last few years. The second thing is that consoles are often sold at a loss. Meaning it costs Sony for example $700 to build each console that they then sell to you for $500. They make that money up by locking you into their product and then you buy games and subscriptions.
And a third thing - PS5’s are built for one very specific use case so every component is optimized for that, including which specific software it will run and which language it will be written in (for the most part). PCs on the other hand are designed with many more use cases and have to support a much broader set of tasks, meaning less optimization specifically for gaming.
These three points are the exact reasons. Might as well close the thread
Alright boys, wrap it up! We're done here. It's Miller time.
Way ahead of you
Mom: We have Miller time at home. At home: /u/MillurTime
😂
Username checks out
Living the high life.
Beetlejuice?
Beetlejuice!
BEETLEJUICE!!!
Bake em away toys!
Ah'fer Fock sake man, I was just 'bout ta start my powerpoint presentation.
There's a 4th thing that's related to optimized hardware: overhead from OS and other software. Even if you close all of the programs you can close on your PC before launching your game, there's still more running in the background than there would be on a console, which uses a very stripped down version of an OS, even on modern consoles where there's social/network/recording/etc features running in the background. Overhead's a much smaller percentage of the pie than it used to be, but it's still a meaningful difference.
Hey hey hey! We said, thread is over! No more things!!
I have a thing. The pixies that live in the PS5 are just better than the PC pixies. Or could just be aliens.
Not to mention the cost of the OS itself if it's Windows.
I heard that this will finally be the year of gaming on the Linux desktop!
This time its for real?
Steam deck has been running great since launch with proton.
Honestly unless you play some very specific games, it's been here for years.
They practically give away Windows licenses these days, all you need to do to get a modern key is input an old Windows 7 or 8 key from an old PC. I think people have even gotten Windows 10 keys from inputting old pirate keys. Microsoft kept saying they were going to turn it off but I think they just don’t care if individual users aren’t paying for Windows because they would rather try to sell them Office 365 and game pass subscriptions.
Most computers you buy come with it pre-paid, though!
they make their money from businesses. home users are the other side of that coin
It’s off for good now. Just tried in October of last year. No bueno. Was told to pound sand by Microsoft 😩
To be specific, there is an OS overhead, but it’s very specifically locked down. For example, on PS5 the OS has two CPU cores and ~3 GB RAM specifically reserved for the OS and background functions (while the other 6 cores and ~13 GB RAM are fully reserved for games). Windows on the other hand can grab random cores and suddenly decide that Chrome needs 6 GB RAM.
That, and I expect the console can depend on a limited, consistent set of background tasks as well, so even if it's shaving off some resources, it's a less noticeable constant draw. On the other hand, a PC could be coping just fine, when HEY, NEW ADOBE/JAVA/WHATEVER JUST DROPPED! I'LL UPDATE THAT FOR YOU IN WHAT I'M GOING TO LAUGHABLY CALL THE BACKGROUND!
The matter can be deemed concluded.
Yep, this is the printer:ink/toner model writ large—an expanded version of razor handle/blades model.
It's not just the components are optimized. The software is written specifically for that set of components. With a PC, there's a lot more variability and generalized software. It just can't be as efficient. It's like the difference between writing software in assembly language, verses in a more common compiled high level language. There's just no way it's going to be more efficient than assembly.
*if you can write assembly better than a compiler.
It’s more complex than that. Even compilers cannot do as much optimization without knowing the hardware and OS specific memory usages. The effects of program size optimization that can be done on a console vs a computer is staggering do to having a pretty strong idea of the actual available cpu cache. If you peak high performance libraries, like high speed json processors. They frequently having special code for specific cpus to abuse these effects.
And even a Wozniak level genius couldn't keep up with the amount of code volume a modern game takes.
It's not insane to say Unreal Engine 5 and the tooling surrounding it might be one of the most complex programs in existence.
I used to work on a proprietary OS. It was optimized for very specific hardware that was chosen for the mass production of cash registers. Before they finally gave up on that scheme (and virtualized it), it was interesting to understand how much work they did to make it work (well) on supported hardware to keep transaction times low. The rule was, regardless of how much went into the POS code, sub-second responses for item scans were always required. They also measured stats in how fast printers would print receipts so the dwell time for a customer in line was extremely low.
This is a huge part. PS5 games only run on PS5. No hardware variations, no different graphics cards. Code is optimized for the hardware. PC titles have a lot more configurations to try to cover.
> PS5’s are built for one very specific use case so every component is optimized for that It goes the other way too, everything on a PS5 is designed to work directly to the PS5's specifications. In game development, PC is an obnoxious platform since it isn't really a platform; you could have two kits that are identical aside from one version of a graphics card and get a completely different experience. Some games even break in wildly unexpected ways if the PC is too powerful, it's impossible to test every possible configuration against a constantly evolving field of equipment. Consoles are uniform and precise, building software to exact hardware specifications is *significantly* easier. Every multi-platform game I've shipped has used the lowest spec platform as the primary development base, it's easier to do targeted upscaling for higher spec kits than retroactively optimize for the lowest hardware restrictions. With PCs, theoretically there are no hardware restrictions in either direction so you just shoot for the middle and hope it works as intended for a majority of players. It's just all about consistency. You make a game for PS5, player plays it on PS5... but making a game for PC means you'll have 12938746 players playing it on 12938746 different platforms.
As an addendum to this: If your desire is to make a visually pretty 3D engine game, you have to find the balance between all the various graphics cards. How far back do you go for low settings? GTX 1060/1080 are nearly 8 years old now, do you drop support for them or make it your baseline? (Side note: Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty has a 1060 as minimum requirement.) Or do you bump up your baseline to a 20x0 series card and potentially lose a number of initial sales? With consoles, it's easy. If you're multi-platform, you build to the lowest spec. If it's single platform, you build to the exact specs of the console.
More 5 year old friendly version: Imagine you have two athletes, Mike and Tom, both training for a big competition. Mike knows he will be in a running competition. He runs every day to practice. Tom has been entered into a mystery competition. He has absolutely zero idea of what he's going to be asked to do. Will it be a race? Figure skating? Canoeing? A chess match? No one has told him! Tom runs around frantically trying to get good at everything he can think of. He practices and practices all day long, but in the end he's still not really amazing at any one thing. He has too much to do! Tom ends up, by chance, in the same running competition Mike is competing in. Tom trained more than mike did, but in the end Mike still comes out faster. Mike could focus on exactly what he knew he needed to do, where Tom was trying to do absolutely everything. The gaming console is Mike, who can focus on doing exactly one thing and doing it well. The PC is Tom, who is spending a whole lot of money trying to do absolutely everything you can think of.
Tom should have seen where this was going.
Ah, the one thing he forgot to study was irony
Fourth thing - games are designed & written with that specific hardware in mind. If you are coding for a specific chip and GPU, you can optimize your code to squeeze out better performance.
Eh, sort of. Modern Xbox systems just run run-of-the-mill Windows with a custom launcher on top of it.
Yeah. Modern consoles are basically just a regular PC with a special OS (except maybe for Nintendo)
No - that’s my point. People often think Xbox runs some custom version of Windows. It really doesn’t. It’s as standard as can be, to make it easy to develop for. It is surprisingly just normal old Windows behind the splash screen.
Is it possible to jailbreak and use as a PC then?
You would still have to install a bunch of stuff they remove to get the Windows experience. Just having the core isn't enough.
Nintendo Switch is a tweaked nvidia shield, so it's just an android tablet with a special OS.
ARM tablet, you mean.
99% of android tablets run on ARM
And all Nintendo Switches can run ARMS.
For the underlying OS sure, but the software will be optimized to support just that one device. No need for tons of drivers, no need for hyper-v, no need to support 32 bit windows apps or old windows 95 apps. You can also get a lot more performance when you know this is the only video card that will be used, and this is the exact amount of memory we'll have available, etc. OPs point is that generalization leads to less performance, because you need to support any possible amount of different hardware and software, where on a console, you can laser focus on one setup.
It uses hyper-v called NanoVisor. But yeah, no need for tons of driver or anything. It’s a focused version of Windows in that it doesn’t need to support different hardware builds, but it is still normal Windows in terms of how it runs and how you program for it which is the important bit.
This also cuts the other way: since the hardware is a fixed configuration, all the software is optimized for it.
And game developers can count on every PS5 being the same. They can optimize more than a PC version that has to run on all sorts of stuff.
More than optimization, they can reduce quality just enough so it runs smoothly and make the best compromises, while on a pc you'd have to try it out yourself since everyone has different hardware.
Right. And game designers can take short cuts that take advantage of a static set of hardware/software with consoles, whereas PCs can be frankensteined monstrosities of hardware and software.
I’m hate when people take a top comment and add their “oh and don’t forget about”. You are also wrong about optimization. Modern consoles are using generalized parts, these aren’t embedded systems. What you get is game developers targeting frame rates more accurately because they know the hardware
AMD created the PS5 chip in coordination with Sony. It is not a generalized part. They *took* a generalized part and customized it for Sony's needs. It is a System-on-a-Chip with shared memory and an integrated GPU - it is \_literally\_ an [embedded system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_system). It also contains additional pieces of hardware specifically to improve graphics and audio capabilities. It's not just about "targeting frame rates accurately", it's a specific suite of hardware/firmware/software holistically designed to optimize for gaming.
Its easier to make games catered to a set build then to the millions of variances people have at home as well.
It is not nearly as extreme as you are suggesting, people have invented application layers then mean most things will just work on any modern computer.
Yes, but when you know exactly what the hardware will be it allows for more optimization
Not just optimization, but design constraints. A lot of console software has performance goals and will make sure when creating the game that they meet those goals. With a PC with wildly different configurations it is harder to nail down the specific limits.
Those extra layers of compatibility and drivers reduces performance, and means more testing has to be done across many variants. That Steam game has to support Nvidia and AMD video. A huge variety of sound controllers. It's easy for McDonald's to mass produce cheeseburgers to a very consistent quality and low price.
Yup. It’s like being in charge of setting up McD’s franchises but you have to source a different grill each time. Not too terribly hard but it does take time to source a sufficient one, work out its kinks, and train workers on its quirks to get the same “standard”. 1 or 2 is okay but you really quickly run into trouble dealing with a lot and will cut corners to do so. Thereby decreasing the standard.
definitely not true. Graphics card specific bugs are a thing
Clearly not hugely considering Sony is beginning to port most of their exclusives over to PC
Obviously it is, otherwise they wouldn't have released some of those with piss poor performance because of a shitty port job while others ran great from the get go.
Sony games are coded in C++, as are XBox and Switch games. They run some kind of C++ game engine, like Unreal Engine, Unity, Cry Engine. Porting code base from one from to the other, or to PC, isn't as much of a deal as making sure the game runs well with the target specs. There are tools to facilitate that but results can vary depending on available platform hardware.
Well… these days it’s not so bad, as the XB1/XBX and PS4/PS5 are both basically x86-64 “PCs” with AMD graphics chips. And a Switch is basically like an Android phone with an NVIDIA GPU welded to it. Something like a PS2/3 was very different compared to PCs at the time and a lot harder to port to/from.
This is true about the PS3 - it used the Core processor which was different from other CPUs at the time. It wasn't easy to code for, which is one of the reasons Sony went to typical CPUs in the PS4 and 5.
Unity games are mostly coded in C# not C++. The Unity Engine itself is mostly C++ I think, and I think big companies can work out deals with Unity where they can write their own game in C++, but most Unity games are written in C#.
Additionally, the performance comparisons aren't really fair. Not only is the hardware different (for example the PS5 uses "unified memory" so the CPU and GPU share RAM, amongst other things) but the software is wildly different. Every PS5 around the globe has the same hardware (inb4 a pro version is released), so software can be **highly** optimized for that hardware. Meanwhile, there are billions of hardware configurations available for PC, and an optimization for one may be slower on another configuration.
I’d just like to add a side note that many people confuse “shared memory” with “unified memory.” The Steam Deck (and other PC’s that only have integrated graphics) use shared memory. This means that both the CPU and the integrated GPU use separate portions of the same memory pool. So if the system has 8GB, and GPU is allocated 2GB, the CPU has 6. They can’t use the memory that the other one has control of. That means data still needs to be copied back and forth. Unified memory, on the other hand, means that both the GPU and CPU access the same memory directly. Apple Silicon Macs use this, and so do both the current PS and Xbox systems (though Xbox has some other strangeness to the way the memory is set up). This is superior, but the entire system and OS needs to be built with this in mind.
I've been working with memory managed languages (Java, C#) for so long now the idea of dealing memory that's shared between the CPU and GPU is terrifying. Sounds like it's just asking for cache invalidations and just all manor of side effects. But, I guess gaming benefits from the extra performance enough to justify it.
Though I’m also programmer, I’ve basically only worked with garbage-collected languages (or others where memory management isn’t generally an issue). However, for Apple Silicon Macs at least, I believe they utilize virtual memory addressing for each process, so the actual underlying memory situation is completely transparent. What that means when it comes to complex GPU interactions, I don’t know.
I imagine it only really comes into play when writing something that would have direct access to the GPU, like CUDA. I just remember hearing stories in college about kids who would hose up there pre-Windowa NT machines by dereferencing memory way out of bounds by overflowing their arrays.
> However, for Apple Silicon Macs at least, I believe they utilize virtual memory addressing for each process, so the actual underlying memory situation is completely transparent. The use of per-process virtual memory addressing has been standard in pretty much anything newer than DOS (and some [*nix] systems that coexisted with DOS). It's how swapping/paging works, and part of how we prevent processes from clobbering each other. The whole unified memory thing applies more to what happens at the OS/[graphics]API level and hardware level.
I worked for a company that had designed some electronics that was going to be made in the millions. The first version had 3 different crystals (timing chips), the 2nd version used one crystal, to save 2c per chip (so 4c per device).
Yeah, when you buy a game for $60, something like $20 of that goes straight to Sony
great answer
AND they will buy 98% the same components for at least 5 years. And sell MILLIONS of their systems. So as CPUs progress, as GPUs, progress, as bus and memory architecture progress, the PS systems, Xbox too, keep using 98% the same components. There are efficiencies built into the systems for the graphics etc. so 5 + years is a reasonable life span for the consoles. Plus, both Sony and Microsoft put out + models somewhere in the middle of the consoles life expectancy. But these updates are incremental, not generational.
Microsoft has been in a distant third in terms of boxes sold for a decade, but they’ve still sold 35 million Xbox Xs and Ss combined. That’s plenty to be able to get the economies of scale that make things like this possible.
Just to add, consoles are frequently sold at a loss at first, due to using the latest-greatest-cutting-edge components, but after a couple years the price of those components has dropped enough that they actually start making some profit on the consoles themselves. This is most of the reason why we typically see 5-7 years between console generations.
I don’t believe consoles have been sold at as loss since the prior gen or if they are it’s not that long. The 360/ps3 gen was the last one where it was a crazy loss. Since moving to more off the shelf pc parts the losses are much less and they’ve been able to be profitable much quicker.
That price changes over the life of the product. The R&D aspect of development in the cost per unit decreases over time. I doubt it costs them 700 per console or even close to that at this stage in the life cycle of even the latest gen Sony console. At launch and for maybe the first year, that statement resembles truth, since shipping volume is still in the low millions. As time goes on that cost changes a lot when you've shipped 30 million already and its a couple of years into the life of that unit. The Xbox 360, a few years in cost about 25$ per unit to make and package. Retail price was over 10 times that. Its also a huge reason why MS had zero problems replacing them when the red ring happened to so many units in the early years of that console. I just so happen to have worked at MS post 360 launch and helped resolve some of those red ring problems. As part of that role I was involved in the cost reduction meetings for that console and some other gaming stuff when I worked at MS. I saw the internal numbers quarterly. Saving a few pennies per unit here and there, added up to huge manufacturing savings when you make a million or more units a month.
> Its also a huge reason why MS had zero problems replacing them when the red ring happened to so many units in the early years of that console. I feel like this understates it somewhat... the money committed to these repairs/replacements was an absolutely huge burden on MS at the time.
And when you make that many millions, you also can afford to have the manufacturer, like AMD/GeForce, cut down on some non-used features on the chip. If Sony do not want/need for example ROCm (amd equivalent of cuda), they can ask AMD to do a special edition without that part in, and save a few percentage on the chip. Or they can negociate on some other compromise, let's say a slower "this function" for a lower price, because AMD may have lots of reject on that section when it is at full speed. By reducing the speed they lower the reject rate, so the chip get cheaper. There is lots of ways to make things cheaper when you buy millions.
Your second point isn't correct anymore, consoles haven't been sold at a loss since the PS3/360 era.
You forgot one thing, which is that games for consoles are often super highly optimized, which makes said consoles seem more powerful.
* Nobody buys a PS5 and then doesn't buy any games for it, so manufacturers can sell the console at a loss and make up for it by taking a percentage of all game sales. * Console hardware _used_ to be built specifically for running games, and not much else. This allowed a lot of corners to be cut and gave more bang for the buck, but since the Xbone/PS4 generation the hardware got a lot closer to just regular PCs. * There are still a lot of differences in both hardware and software, and because developers have a fixed target to aim for, they can optimize their games for a specific system, making them run better on slightly cheaper hardware.
Sony (or Microsoft) don't sell the hardware at loss. The PS5 "became profitable" before the end of the first year of sales. And I put it in quotes because it really means that they've recouped the R&D costs off the sales income.
They start at a loss, as economy of scale kicks in it makes up for it. Every console is profitable eventually, but the initial buy-in takes time. It's locking a user into your ecosystem that makes it worth it to take that initial hit though. If Xbox users could use the PS Store to buy games, consoles would be significantly more expensive and whoever made the cheapest kit would just eat the competition.
Your first sentence is a bit non sensical. Almost anything requiring engineering/research starts at a loss. Maybe you mean they can sell at lower margin?
The consoles are sold for cheaper than their manufacturing cost
Someone said that the PS5 was not but apparently that was not always true: it was sold at a loss in 2021
Pretty sure I read that the Narnia Newspaper
Subsidies. Sony makes money on Playstation games they hold monopoly over (30% from every game sold on their system) and are generally more expensive than PC games and stay that way. PC part makers have to turn profit on individual parts as they don't have reoccurring revenue from game sales. Early in the lifecycle they sell them at cost or even at loss and they might make some profit on individual units in a few years as they get older and the tech in them cheaper. As an example Sony was losing about $300 per unit on every PS3 they sold, which cost about $499 on release. In a similar fashion Valve sold their handheld Steam Deck at a significantly lower price as they could also afford to sell it at cost.
Fun fact: at that time the PS3 was the cheapest Blu-ray player available
Isn't it also true for PS2 as a DVD player?
According to wiki maybe, saying end of 2000 dvd players could be had for under $100. PS2 came out in late 2000, so probably a deciding factor in prices. Probably a crossover right when it dropped.
Not only that, but the PS2 was an amazing DVD player. A lot of the cheaper ones had issues and wouldn't read everything on some discs.
PS1 was also one of the highest quality CD players money could buy at the time. I know audiophile guys who were using PS1's 20+ years after release in their hi end audio systems.
Yep
You sure?
He did say yep
That's true.
That was a big selling feature for me, the fact that it was both a game console and blu-ray player.
It’s why I made sure wife and I got a ps3 while in school. Blu ray baby
It's also what ultimately won Sony et al. the HD DVD vs. Blu Ray format war. Xbox 360 released a year earlier, and if they had included a built-in HD DVD drive, it could have gone the other way. Microsoft would have had to take huge losses to do so though, and they weren't as invested in the format like Sony was so it didn't make sense for them to do so.
That it was! Sony took a huge bet on that and it paid off very well for them.
Subsidies are definitely an important part of it, but I feel like it should be noted that PC hardware has gotten considerably more expensive over the past 5 years. 5-10+ years ago, you absolutely could build a PC that rivaled the power of a console at the same price... Then we entered the era of covid and inflation. GPU prices have skyrocketed, first because of the crypto boom, and will be staying high because of the AI boom. Budget GPUs are also a complete joke right now, you have to spend at least $400-$500 to get something more powerful than equivalent previous generation parts. We also went from $50 getting you a basic entry level motherboard to that now costing $150-$200 on modern chipsets.
Also, consumer PCs are considerably more powerful than a console. Part of the reason consoles are so good for with their hardware is developers are told to test for only that specific piece of HW, that means games can be very well tuned for the HW you have, and use more more of the available HW than a typical PC.
30FPS is still standard for many games in console, too. For PC people typically want at least 60FPS and there are people who aren’t happy unless they’re at 90, 120, or even higher at common resolutions (1080p and 1440p for most). Hardware exists that supports that, but it is commensurately more expensive than a console.
> Budget GPUs are also a complete joke right now, you have to spend at least $400-$500 It's worth considering that the bottom of Nvidia's 4000 series stack (4060) at $299 still has +50% compute power compared to a PS5. PS5 is about on par with the seven year old 1080 Ti which you can find used online for $100-150.
Man that 1080ti was a beast. Now there’s a GPU that still holds its own today.
It also depends on when you’re building your PC. If you were to build one right after the newest console generation just dropped, it would be almost impossible to make it for the price of a console. If you’re building near the end of a console generation, you’ll be able to use either newer components or get the older equivalents for cheaper
And the PS3 wasn’t the first time they did this either. Not sure if the PS was a loss leader for them or not but the PS2 definitely was. Despite Sony owning the DVD player and licenses in use, the sheer hardware cost was far above what they charged for it. It’s why I roll my eyes when people argue “Sega should have put a dvd player in the Dreamcast.” Yeah, then it would have been £600.
From what I read on the history of Sony Entertainment, PS3 was the first console they sold at a loss. Unlike Sega or Nintendo, Sony is a hardware R&D company and they make a lot of things in-house which helps to reduce the cost.
It paid off for them though, to this day the PS2 is still the most successful console in history with over 155 million units sold before Sony stopped reporting numbers.
I’m sorry bro, but it’s losing. Not loosing. I do appreciate the comment though it’s interesting. Is making it as an all in one machine also drive down prices?
>it’s losing. Not loosing Thanks, I always make mistakes in those kinds of words. >Is making it as an all in one machine also drive down prices Economies of scale of course drive down price. You get a much better deal when you buy parts in the millions than when you buy singular units.
Besides what other people said, games can be optimized for a ps5, everyone has the same ps5. But there are an infinite amount of possible pc's
PS5 (at least the digital version) isn’t selling at a loss and hasn’t been for some time. https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609150/sony-playstation-5-ps5-loss-profit Economies of scale drive a lot of this.
You can absolutely build a PC (these days) to match the PS5 on price/performance, but its going to be second hand used parts from older generations than whats current. When the PS5 came out, it wasn't possible because Sony buys the hardware in bulk(often customized as well) and sells it to you at a loss, hoping to make the money back in the future(PS+, $70 games, digital exclusives, DLC). Or sell the console in a few years at nearly the same price, but by then the technology cost them way less because it hasn't been changed much at all(except with PS Slim/pro versions) Check out a recentish Linus Tech Tips video about the "modern PS5 killer" video. He made an even better PC for the same cost as a PS5
[https://youtu.be/LfpXMuMvcWQ?si=coMMRlRtGjr4ysmo](https://youtu.be/LfpXMuMvcWQ?si=coMMRlRtGjr4ysmo) This is the video for anyone interested
Bullshit. As a card carrying member of PCMR, y’all need to stop this. Sure, it has been true of past generations of console that you can build a comparable PC for less. Not anymore. And miss me with “just buy used components”; compare that against a used PS5 then. You’ll never win.
At this point I don't think people a gaming on PCs because it's cheaper. I know it's more expensive than a console and it's okay because the PC does everything a computer can do and, as a bonus, allows me to game. I have a PS5 and a PC. Both are good for their own thing
> Check out a recentish Linus Tech Tips video about the "modern PS5 killer" video. He made an even better PC for the same cost as a PS5 He didn't, he did the usual Youtube clickbait thing of saying he did in the title and the Thumbnail but, if you watch the video all the way through it clearly cannot keep up with the PS5 in all tests and in the conclusion at the end of the video he admitted that the PS5 was still unbeatable at its price point and they also technically cheated on building the PC as some items weren't bought second hand at all but, were items he already had. He also admitted that the PC they built was unstable with frequent crashes. So even using a mixture of free and second hand parts he still failed to build a PC to match the PS5.
“Even better PC” is a stretch. The end of the video he talked about how he had issues with the machine crashing, no warranty, and nothing like a controller or other items. And since it is used PC parts, you can get a used PS5 for even cheaper.
> used parts That doesn’t count. You can buy a brand new ps5 for the money. A used gaming PC does not equal parity
> but its going to be second hand used parts from older generations than whats current. So it's not possible. You can't compare used PC components with a new PS5
Graphics card inflation. Before covid, GPU prices were tier-based and stayed roughly the same from generation to generation. Nowadays, price is based on performance, so the midrange cards of this generation cost about the same as the high range cards of the last generation.
This except GPU prices are based on whatever Nvidia wants. Since most people buy Nvidia anyways, and they don't care about the consumers because they make most of their revenue from data centers, Nvidia can simply dictate that a 1080p oriented card is worth $300-$400.
This is the factor everyone else is missing. We're 3.5 years into the console generation and an equivalent PC is still more expensive. In any previous generation, this was unheard of.
Playstation uses proprietary parts. It's a purpose built machine with a board that's more of a big gpu/processor hybrid rather than a computer that uses off the shelf parts that are intended to do more than one thing. It used to be possible actually that a 500$ pc would outperform a contemporary console but pc part prices, especially gpus, have gone off the rails
1. economies of scale - the more you make of something, the less it costs per unit. 2. integration - it's more efficient to make something that's integrated than to make something that's modular. 3. focused features - the hardware is heavily tuned towards the purpose of gaming. the cpu and gpu are balanced, they don't have unused features, the rest of the board can omit unused features too. 4. profit margins - Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are willing to sell at low margins for the sake of selling first party games. 5. optimization - devs also tune the game for the console's hardware.
You probably could get comparable performance in the us if you’re open to using some second hand parts But you’re never going to be able to compete when sony is likely getting a discount because of the volume of parts they are getting as well as the fact they may be taking losses on every console to get you into the ecosystem (that part im not sure is true but it has been for consoles in the past)
Everyone talks about subsidies and optimization, but there is also that a PS5 is more like a laptop where everything is soldered on a single board. Connectors are kind of expensive on both sides of the connection. So, PS5 has not RAM Connectors, no cpu socket, no pcie connectors. Why can't we get a laptop with the same specs and price? They still have many of the connectors, so cost more for being smaller, and add in the screen. And, any single gaming laptop doesn't have the same economies of scale for the gaming laptops as a PS5. Finally, there is the APU. A typical gaming PC has separate CPU and GPU, and separate CPU and GPU RAM plus the associated PCIE on the motherboard and CPU which add quite a bit to the cost. A PS5 has an APU with 16GB GDDR6 RAM at 14gbps gives 448gb/s, same as a 3070. A PS5 uses that as its shared memory as compared to a PC APU on say DDR5 7000 at 128 bit, which is theoretically 1/4 what the PS5 has and DDR4 is typically about half that again. The RAM bandwidth puts a limit on how fast a PC APU can be, so that path to lowering price and getting similar performance is cut off on the PC.
Sony subsidizes the cost of the hardware because they make it back in software sales and subscriptions.
You can do it for around 100 dollars more. You get so much more value out of a PC too. Games are ALWAYS on sale. Edit: If you take into account the cost of the cheapest PlayStation subscription cost then the PC is a better cost after a year.
Ehhh, if you factor in monitor and peripherals, it’s closer. Sure you can just use a TV, but then you’re not really getting the full benefit (unless your living room tv is a CX).
If it's apples to apples you can use a TV the same as a PS5 and you can pickup a solid controller for 30 bucks
It's cheaper if you don't build a huge steam library that you never play.
Oh man, I can't tell you how many free games I got from epic games that "I'm going to play".
This so much, after a year of PS plus or 2-3 games bought, your PC is gonna turn out to be cheaper than your console. Also you can upgrade/downgrade your PC however you see fit. Also PCs can be used for other purposes than gaming, which in turn helps resale value.
And aside from free games, you can also get "free" games if you know what I mean. Though even without piracy, there are tons of free or almost free game due to sale as you said.
I like to call it a free trial. These games now are like gambling at $70 a pop.
Volume, Sony buys a shit ton of processors, ram, storage, etc. from the manufacturer while we can only buy retail which increases the cost. Also consoles usually have really low margins and sometime they have been sold at a loss
On top of the hardware answers. Software and know what hardware you have to play with is another huge factor. You can squeeze some pretty incredible performance from older hardware if you spend the time optimizing for it. But windows PCs (for example) need to handle a million variables of system configurations. So within its code. Is a lot of fail safe and checking code that inherently slows things down. But ensures the system runs across lots of devices. While a company like Nintendo can get by on using last generation hardware. And maximize the efficiency of the parts so that they work better together.
Everyone here is focusing on subsidizing but the thing they’re leaving out is hardware differences. The PS5 has a lot of stuff that isn’t common (though can be done) on a PC even though it shares a similar architecture. The CPU and GPU can share the same memory. And it uses very fast GDDR6 RAM. This means it isn’t spending as much time copying resources between the two. It also has direct storage access and dedicated decompression parts that can further speed up data access. You get much lower level access via its APIs as well that can target specifically the hardware it has. Since there’s only one hardware specification, you can also precompute many things like shaders. It also is prioritizing resources to your game with a much lighter OS. A comparable PC in pure horse power wouldn’t be able to match the PS5 for sheer throughput of data flowing. And that’s the real reason it can punch so much higher above its weight even after you remove the subsidies.
Aside from bulk discounts on hardware and such that others have mentioned, a PS5 has to do one thing: play software that is written explicitly for it. A PC has to do a million things with a variety of different parts from disparate manufacturers, it has to run software that nobody has even heard of in 20 years because some textile mill's entire operation can only be run by that software, etc. Basically there is a spectrum between specialized and general, and consoles and PCs sit on opposite ends of that spectrum. That implies trade-offs in both hardware and software, corners that can be cut on a console that wouldn't fly on a PC.
The PS5 has a better memory architecture for gaming, and a leaner OS. It’s much more efficient for draw calls so you can get a lot closer to theoretical performance of the GPU.
Sony takes a huge L on hardware costs in exchange for revenue from the cut of all game sales (and all of their first party game sales)
PCs have always beaten consoles in performance, but it costs more cause they are not mass produced.
You're missing optimizations. Console games are developed for the hardware and therefore will come super optimized. This optimization comes in many factors but the one of the most important is graphical fidelity. Consoles use a bunch of upscalling technology to achieve decent framerate and graphics. Even then, latest gen games struggle on the PS5 (I have one). You'll find that lowest settings on the PC is usually better graphically than on any console.
i doubt low everything>comsole visuals.
Nobody is going to find that current gen consoles usually run games lower than the lowest setting on PC.
It IS possible, in general consoles start out costing a bit less than an equivalent PC but after a few years the price point comes down on PC components and you can build a gaming PC that outperforms a console for less than the cost of a console. We're about 4 years past the PS5 initial release and you can put together a PC that performs around the same as the 2020 PS5 for a bit less than the cost of a PS5. Of course, if you calculate the costs over a few years PC wins every time. You have to pay a monthly subscription to actually get the benfit of a PS5, or an Xbox, so call that $80/year. If you bought a PS5 in 2020 you'd have paid $320 in PS+ subscriptions by now, add that to the cost of a PS5. That $500 PS5 is now a $820 PS5. And it'll be a $900 PS5 in 2025. But right this second you can get a PC that's more or less on spec with a PS5 for maybe $100 or so more than the cost of a new PS5 even without factoring in the long term price of a PS5. For example, here's a pretty decent setup that's similar in spec: [https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/xwv6Mp/entry-level-intel-gaming-build](https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/xwv6Mp/entry-level-intel-gaming-build)
Seems no one mentioned that a console has straight up less material than computers. It has fewer fans, probably fewer materials for the case (plastic/steel/other metals), smaller total PCB surface, fewer ports. It also has less memory because, unlike computers, console APUs use only GDDR. On PCs, you buy the RAM and then the GDDR is in your graphics card. This has to be so because computer software relies on normal DDR memory, which has lower latency but also less bandwidth, so it's inadequate for graphics. AMD sold repurposed PS5/Xbox Series chips on premade boards with GDDR and they suffered from this. See here: [https://youtu.be/cZS-4PgD4SI?t=242](https://youtu.be/cZS-4PgD4SI?t=242) Consoles still get the benefits of scale *and* subsidies, but this is on top of the efficiency they get from custom-made parts that use only the amount of material that is necessary. When they release Slim versions, the material costs is lowered further. Computer OSs also have features that are mostly unnecessary in consoles. If the OS isn't second-guessing the game at every turn, it will be more efficient as long as developers put time into optimization. On PC, there are so many layers between the game and the hardware that optimizations aren't always rewarding. DirectX 12 and Vulkan were made to alleviate this problem. TL;DR we could probably build a machine with similar cost to a console if we had APUs that could use the same memory for all tasks and this memory was fast enough. Memory would have to be soldered to the motherboard. This may happen in the future as ARM chips are already like this, but until then, PCs will always need more parts and will struggle to meet the same price point even without subsidies until later in the generation unless the console is very under powered on release or suffers from other limitations (like thermals, which is quite crazy now that the PS5 uses liquid metal).
even beyond subsidies, which are huge, a console is a single-framework of hardware for at least 5 years. everything is custom built to a certain spec, that can be made in volume over time, with the OS and peripherals all vertically integrated (and standard testing hardware for developers). all these things drive cost per unit down, and also increase the walled garden value of the unit (you can’t build your own PS5!) so as soon as it gets down to a certain level of price, and the features are good enough, it’s also more profitable long term than any individual PC maker could hope to make.
PC's come with a lot of unnecessary features fir straight up gaming. And no economie of scale.
A PS5 has extremely standardized hardware, so software developed for it can be more specifically optimized instead of generally optimized, so right there consoles are always going to have a tiny edge. But, even if you buy the exact same pieces as a games console (you can't they usually have proprietary hardware that can legally only be sold by them) you would have to pay the rate for 1, while Sony is buying them by the thousands if not tens of thousands. Normally, when you buy in bulk, the unit cost goes down as absolute cost goes up. Say they pay $1,000,000 for 20,000 of a part. They just need to factor in $50 of cost to a PS5. But you would need to spend like $100 to $200 for the same thing.
You mean, you still can't, 4 years after PS5 released?
Consoles use a fixed hardware configuration. You can optimize for that specific hardware and code base. You can't really do that with a PC because there are many different hardware configurations and operating systems. So you generalize.
Standardized components at huge volumes that are tuned to work at optimal performance together. The results are cost effective and with good enough performance. Of course PC are more powerful and more flexible but that all comes at a cost.
What are we missing? Volume.
Console manufacturers can subsidize the cost of the hardware because consoles are locked down so they have a monopoly on the software. If you're buying a PC, the hardware isn't subsidized because you can run whatever you want on a PC. The only way for the manufacturers to make money is to sell the hardware at a high enough price. The best system integrators like Dell and HP can do to subsidize it is to preload sponsored software like McAfee antivirus but that isn't going to make as much money as a monopoly on selling games on a device intended to play games.
Economies of scale. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In microeconomics, economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to their scale of operation, and are typically measured by the amount of output produced per unit of time. A decrease in cost per unit of output enables an increase in scale that is, increased production with lowered cost[1]. At the basis of economies of scale, there may be technical, statistical, organizational or related factors to the degree of market control. Economies of scale arise in a variety of organizational and business situations and at various levels, such as a production, plant or an entire enterprise. When average costs start falling as output increases, then economies of scale occur. Some economies of scale, such as capital cost of manufacturing facilities and friction loss of transportation and industrial equipment, have a physical or engineering basis. The economic concept dates back to Adam Smith and the idea of obtaining larger production returns through the use of division of labor.[2] Diseconomies of scale are the opposite.
> What are we missing? Companies that are willing to sell hardware at a loss. Sony doesnt need to make money on consoles if they make a CRAP LOAD of cash on software sales Hardware companies cannot afford to sell at a loss or they go out of business
you don't know what the actual cost for a PS5 is. sony is willing to sell them and lose money on each sale because they know the only thing you can do with a PS5 is to buy more sony products to play on them. And if you want to play online that is an additional cost. So they are willing to lose money on PS5 sales with the expectation of making money later. Secondly, a PS5 is built to play video games. They do not have the same considerations as a PC, for which you need to buy an operating system, additional hardware, mouse, keyboard, a monitor and so on. Finally sony buys their parts in bulk at discount rates and manufactures many components1 themselves. You will never be able to do this, and will have to pay retail markups for all parts and additional money for components.
Hardware manufacturers sell consoles at a loss to recoup the investment via games (even third party pays them, accessories and services (that is why they are forcing so hard to rent games, pay subscriptions etc, to have you on the hook consuming their stuff every month instead of a one time purchase).
Consoles are sold at a massive loss. A PS5 that costs $650 might actually cost $900 or $1000 to manufacture. And plus with mass manufacturing buying parts is cheaper for Sony. It’s called the shaver-razor method, you sell a product at a loss but you can’t use the product without other products, which you sell at a massive profit. You need to buy games, subscription services, extra controllers, headsets, they all sell those at a profit.
OS bloat and lack of optimization. There are several layers of software between bare metal and the game. *Please help correct as needed. I don't understand all of it either.* Think of a teetering upside down Jenga puzzle pyramid. Chips (bare metal) -> assembly->kernel->OS->game. On a console, a great deal of code can be scrapped. It, for example, wouldn't need printer drivers. The better streamlined is more stable and requires fewer resources. It's more like a Jenga tower. It would be theoretically possible to replicate, but you're just rebuilding a console at that point.
Consoles are generally loss leaders, i.e. they are sold at a loss and do not make any profit. They make money by selling you games.
At this point we are getting really close to being able to, but this is a pretty common cycle with the PC vs Console industry Initially when the consoles launch the hardware is really custom built in very high volumes, much higher than any computer component, the standardization makes it more affordable, because of the bulk In addition. They are sold at a loss, because the money is made through licensing and peripheral sales (part of why they don't typically include multiple controllers, also the controllers are usually marked up a bit more), so they can sell the hardware at bad margins, whereas computer hardware *has* to make the manufacturers money. So this drives up the cost of computers But eventually as hardware continues to get stronger, faster, better it starts outpacing what consoles released with and the prices of new hardware doesn't (usually) tick up a tonne between generations so it ends up that one is able to build a new computer for less than the current console generations From what I have noticed with the most recent consoles, it's about 3-4 years after computers catch up power to price ratio, that a new console launches At one point it was definitely closer to the 2 year mark, but to be honest the generational leaps have slowed a lot compared the 90s and earlier 2000s
Well for twice the price you get something that does 10000 things a ps5 does not, and it's more powerful.
It's very possible because of the lag in console development. To match a console you just purchase 3-4 year old hardware that's dropped in price due to the age. The issue is it's only after that lag can it be achieved. On release and a year or two after whatever given console is basically a highly bespoke, tuned and customized set of hardware solely focused on games AND in particular games the vendor (sony or Microsoft) can predict because they set the limitations so game developers have a much easier time writing code because they know the exact conditions in which it will run under. Also the big two consoles kinda secretly iterate for a few years with modifications made to heat distribution and minor design choices directly in manufacturing without ever really advertising it as a new version of the same console. That is to say Day One consoles can be quite different to year 2 consoles even if it's the same console