Gamasutra (game developers site) heeft een artikel gepost over de performance van game consoles en hoe game developers het voor elkaar krijgen om steeds maar weer hogere prestaties uit onveranderde hardware te purken. Hier een hap (rechtstreek geript van VE, bdw):
Another problem with having a large variety of hardware is that the video game developer cannot reliably predict a user's personal set-up. This lack of information means that a game can not be easily tailored to exploit the strengths and circumvent the weaknesses of a particular system. For example, if all PC's had hard-drives that were all equally very fast, then a game could be created that relied on having a fast hard-drive. Similarly, if all PC's had equally slow hard-drives, but had a lot of memory, then a game could compensate for the lack of hard-drive speed through various techniques, such as caching data in RAM or pre-loading data into RAM. Likewise, if all PC's had fast hard-drives, and not much memory, then the hard-drive could compensate for the lack of much memory by keeping most of the game on the hard-drive, and only spooling in data as needed.Another good example is the difference between polygon rendering capabilities. There is an enormous variation in both performance and effects between hardware assisted polygonal rendering, such that both the look of rendered polygons and the amount of polygons that can be rendered in a given amount of time can vary greatly between different machines. The look of polygons could be made consistent by rendering the polygons purely through software, however, the rendering of polygons is very CPU intensive, so may be impractical since less polygons can be drawn, and the CPU has less bandwidth to perform other functions, such as game logic and collision detection. Other bottlenecks include CD drives, CPU speeds, co-processors, memory access speeds, CPU caches, sound effect capabilities, music capabilities, game controllers, and modem speeds to name a few.
