What? The XBOX 360 was a really fast console for the time.
Hmm, not really, not relatively at least, the CPU was very quirky, so unless you were a beast programmer that knew how to optimise perfectly, each thread was the same as maybe a 1.2ghz p3; of course Epic have some really good programmers, so they managed to get the most out of gears of war, even though gears only uses 2 of the 3 cores of the x360 cpu.
The gpu had to deal with the unified 512mb pool of ram, but it did have that 10mb of eDRAM which was cool.
the reason Gears of War didn't hit 60 fps on the X360 is beacause it ALSO LOOKED INSANE for the time. EPIC decided to go for incredible visuals rather than framerate
No, the reason was the system being underpowered; if the ram wasn't upgraded to 512mb, it wouldn't even have run at 20fps.
Your NES / SNES comparisons with Arcade games of the time is very similar to comparing current gen consoles to Top of the line Gaming PC's. You are talking about a difference of 500$ hardware vs several thousand $ hardware.
That doesn't matter, the point is the arcade versions were the best and intended versions of the game and ran much better, the devs could've chose 20-30fps there as well, and push the "graphics" even more (they were already vastly more beautiful than the console releases), but they didn't, they chose 60fps mostly likely because their games just played much better like that.
I agree that current gen consoles have a well balanced mix of GPU/CPU and that is great.. but that doesn't mean that it's a magic box that can brute force 60 fps everything you throw at it, devs will always have to make sacrifices somewhere to reach those framerates.
well,...of course? PCs also aren't some "magic boxes" that run everything at ultimate settings always at 60+fps, nobody is saying that, that's not the point.
The point is that current consoles have hardware that is much faster than any previous console released, relatively.
The CPUs are actually fast this time, the GPUs are powerful, they have more ram than some people still have in their PCs...the gap between console/pc hardware needed to reach a good balance between visuals and 60 fps is many times smaller this generation; the developers actually have choices now that don't have to sacrifice
as much as they used to with previous consoles, to hit that 60fps, whereas before sometimes they often had no choice.
you could argue that if the PS5 doesn't allow me to have all that at the same time running at decent HD resolutions at 60 fps.. well.. the PS5 is also gimped hardware, isn't it?
...no, now you're just being silly.