| Well you get a few benefits. > stuck in one configuration This is a massive benefit to development everywhere. Additionally to really being able to push the hardware to the limit. It's a lot easier to learn how to properly "abuse" a single configuration then thousands of different pieces of hardware in millions of different configurations. And just in reliability and testing. You can be sure that your exact hardware, with a nearly identical software load has been tested countless times. This is why you can often find games run much smoother on a 5 year old machine, to a modern PC. Additionally API's are significant the fact that I can allocate memory directly on the PS4, and know that it won't ever be paged to disk is pretty significant. Additionally, Sony's rendering API's are much closer to the actual hardware, which give you much more flexibility in usage. Then there are a few differences in the particular set of hardware that give it a good advantages to current PCs notably all 8 gbs of memory is GDDR5, which is very fast. And additionally, it's all shared, and cache-coherent between the GPU and the CPU which is really quite significant. |
This is most obvious near the end of a console's life after developers master the hardware. Compare launch games and final releases for any console.