[shmerl]

I haven't played it myself yet (waiting for Wine to support it on Linux), but I'm sure I've red somewhere, that The Witcher 3 uses reduced settings on consoles and you can't change them there. Developers explicitly recommended running the game on better hardware for those who want max graphics settings. It makes perfect sense to me. Developers use what the hardware allows.

[fsloth]

"Developers use what the hardware allows."

Nonsense. Developers use hardware as well as they understand within given project constraints.

Optimizing modern game engine to run fast is generally considered a non-trivial task. The more arbitrary the hardware platform, the harder it is to optimize.

Yes, if PC port had to target only a specific, known, hardware and software combination (say a specifiv i7 with gtx 1080) then they could probably optimize the shit out of it.

A console is a fixed, known target. Thus it takes much less resources to optimize for it - thus developers can reuse their understanding from project to project.

The AAA game scene is full of recent examples with crawling PC ports, such as Arkham Knight.

[shmerl]

All that doesn't change that fact, that some hardware can push more frames at higher resolution. No matter how fixed the target of console is, you can't leap beyond hardware limits there.

> The AAA game scene is full of recent examples with crawling PC ports, such as Arkham Knight.

Poor quality games isn't an good example of proper hardware usage. There was a time when AAA meant quality. Today it can mean any junk as long as it's funded by big publisher.