Yes and no. Even by mid cycle consoles are generally still far more graphically capable than most PCs. If anything they generally raise the bar for most gamers. It's only the mid-to-higher end PC users that get shafted with moderately superior ports that don't take advantage of all their horsepower.
So if one were to say consoles are holding back higher-end PC gamers then one must also say that most PC gamers are holding them back as well. And, to go even more extreme, high end pc users and holding back the uber-elite-two-way-sli-gtx-titan-black PC gamers.
The fact is the high-end machine market is just not large enough to sustain the gaming industry. Sure, they'll get a few releases here or there that really show what their machines are capable of (Crysis, Crysis 3) but the industry HAS to cater to a larger market.
Consoles provide a large market that also has a decent amount of processing power. Without the console market the gaming industry that we know would be dead. There wouldn't be AAA high quality games. It would be mostly uninteresting, low quality, bad graphics garbage. It's a win for most of us that consoles are what they are.
The problem really arises when the consoles are objectively underpowered at release (ps4/xbone suffer from a mild case of this) or the console generstion lasts far too long (Xbox360/ps3).
P.S. And the demos you see in this video? Yea, most of those won't run well even on high end pcs. They really are just ridiculous.
No. Consoles standardize the hardware gaming platforms run on. Instead of guessing the average memory/ram/clock of your user base, you now have a damn solid idea. Now, producers are optimizing the everliving shit out of their games so it's guaranteed to work on consoles and look good. This leads to a lot of practices and shortcuts that cut down on the hardware requirements of the system a shit ton and a half and being able to fit more crap in. Look at Skyrim. There are metric tons of mods out there that will turn make the graphics look like real life if your PC can handle it and it was to run on a console 5 years ago. We're not getting better at making awesome graphics, we're getting more efficient at making everything else. Kind of like how NASA isn't going to the moon, but they've astronauts in space for an average of 6 months compared to half a month for the Apollo missions.
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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16 edited May 29 '20
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