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While they won’t be completely closing the performance gap, consoles may very well be catching up to high-end PCs in gaming performance.

Multiplatform games such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, Overwatch, Fortnite, Resident Evil, etc. are designed to run on consoles first. For the past eight years all multiplatform games needed to be able to run on the PS4 and Xbox One and were developed with the hardware of those consoles in mind. And the thing about those two consoles is that they had very weak hardware compared to gaming PCs of the time. Back in 2013 when the last-gen PS4/One launched, their hardware was already outdated – specifically the AMD Jaguar-based CPU and the mechanical hard disc drive found in the consoles. 

The relatively cheap Intel Core i5-3570 processor ($213 vs PS4 price of $399) was released for desktop PCs more than a year before the PS4 and Xbox One came out, and was approximately 300-500% better in gaming performance than the 8-core Jaguar processors in the consoles. Anyone with even a decent gaming PC back then already had CPUs that far outclassed the ones found in consoles, and solid-state drives for storage were already becoming mainstream for consumers.

These games that were essentially designed for the PS4 and Xbox One ran far easier on a PC because even low-end PC CPUs were far better than what was found in the consoles. A console game running at 30 fps could easily run at 120+ fps on a PC because there was so much more headroom on PC hardware to run the games faster. That was back in 2013 with the console’s Jaguar CPUs that were originally designed for low-power laptops. However, the current-gen 2021 consoles proudly boast the powerful 3^rd generation Ryzen based desktop CPUs.

What this means for the general gaming ecosystem is that the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles aren’t that far behind current gaming PCs in hardware. The current best gaming CPU on the desktop market, the Ryzen 9 5900X ($549 vs PS5 price of $499) came out at the same time as the PS5/Series consoles and is on average only 15-25% better in gaming performance than the Zen 2 based CPUs in the consoles.

These consoles won’t get to truly show off what their hardware is capable of for a while yet. The vast majority of titles being released right now are cross-generation – all these games are still designed to run on the older PS4 and Xbox One consoles. Those games were developed on game engines designed around the hardware of the 2013 machines and won’t be able to take full advantage of the much better hardware found in the newer 2021 consoles even with next-gen upgrade patches. Once PS5/Series only games start being developed is when we start seeing just how capable the new consoles are. 

The best example you can find of this is “The Medium” – one of the few next-gen titles out so far. The game runs at a dynamic 4k resolution at 30fps on the Series X, while an expensive high-end gaming PC runs it only slightly better. A PC with an RTX 3080 + i9 9900k (total estimated build cost $2000) gets an average of 40-50 fps while the Series X console ($499) can play the game at a stable 30 fps.

PC gaming enthusiasts will still enjoy the premier gaming experience with the best visuals and highest framerates, but it will come at a cost – a cost many already find too uneconomical. As 2021 closes, more and more games will be developed with the PS5/Series hardware as a baseline and gaming PCs that would otherwise double or triple the framerate of console games will be doing so less and less. 

Simply put, this means that those who choose to game on the cheaper consoles can expect bigger and better games that run almost as well as their more expensive PC counterparts. A win for everyone.

About the author: Maldivian Gaming League is a team of e-sports organizers and competition promoters based in the Maldives. For more information, check them out on Facebook or Instagram.