While it’s true that consoles don’t have a dedicated GPU slot the way desktop pc’s do, their architecture is actually closer to that of a laptop where the GPU die is soldered directly onto the motherboard. Consoles are specialised devices meaning they are optimised for specific tasks which explains why they perform better in some games than pc’s with similar specs.
Now the Nvidia chips in the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 are a different story since they are more like the SoC’s you find in smartphones and tablets. That’s actually impressive, but there’s a definite difference in performance compared to more high end machines.
i always wondered about this. thank you for you explanation!
But modern consoles are just x86 CPUs. Sure in the past they where specialized not so much any more.
Also planned obsolescence
In principle integrated graphics are better. They share the same memory as the CPU, so games can just modify memory in place instead of doing a costly data transfer via pcie, this is one of the major pain points in emulators, games expect to just modify memory, while the emulator has to emulate this behaviour with limited bandwidth.
The problem is that most computer games do not take advantage of this, and instead do pcie transfers even if they could simply not do that. Also PC APIs (DirectX, vulkan, etc) are not build around this ability, while console SDKs are.
Plus, a console GPU is much bigger than usual integrated graphics. To put this into perspective, the major selling point of AMD’s me ai max etc etc CPU is the big integrated GPU… It’s still smaller than a ps5 GPU… It is more powerful because it’s newer, but it’s smaller, and the ps6 will likely have a bigger one.
I don’t get it. Integrated graphics just mean that the graphics card is soldered to the board. A normal powerful GPU for playing video games is centimetre in size, while the graphics card integrated into a CPU is probably millimetre size. Once deliberately made for playing video games, the other one is just for displaying text on screen and your wallpaper.
Modern integrated graphics are actually astonishingly good, the latest AMD desktop APU’s can play Cyberpunk 2077 quite well, for instance.
A result of the plague that is Intel Integrated Graphics lmbo!
