Things used to be so simple. Back in 2013, the PS4 and Xbox One launched, and despite both having relatively okay GPUs inside — they also had profoundly underpowered AMD Jaguar CPUs. This awkward lopsided design leaned towards video processing above all other things, and lead to an entire generation of games designed around pushing video hardware alone. That meant that games were often GPU limited — and as such, typically struggled to hit frame rates much beyond 30 FPS on consoles.
The “Pro” and “X” upgrades of these machines did a little bit of work to fix this situation, but both still relied on underpowered ancient CPU architecture being pushed to its limits with some additional clock speed. The only real way to get a good, solid 60FPS+ frame rate in games from this era was to play on a gaming PC. 2013–2022 or so was a wonderful time for PC ports, since it didn’t cost that much to build a PC that could completely smoke these consoles, offering a dramatically better experience. That’s not a new concept in the world of gaming, but the gap hadn’t been quite so drastic in the previous generation.
This was all supposed to change with the arrival of the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles at the end of 2020. And it did. Sort of. They both got a huge CPU…
