The comment above is elaborating on x86 micro-architecture, the differences between how the CPU handles x86 instructions specifically.

The overall system architecture is different between PC, which has discrete memory systems for the CPU and GPU, and a very long pathway between GPU memory and system/CPU memory, versus today's consoles which have unified memory for CPU+GPU, and optimized pathways for loading from persistent storage too.

Consolesuse their own graphics APIs, but you would have any vendor you contract with for graphics support your native graphics API and everything would be "fine". PS5 games use GNM/GNMX Playstation proprietary graphics APIs. Usually PC ports of console native games re-implement the rendering engine using the PC graphics APIs like DirectX or Vulkan. The re-implementation is probably less efficient and less tuned.

Horizon Forbidden West was ported from PS to PC. Decima is an engine from Sony’s first-party studio, so it's understandable that their development process would lean more towards PS's internal architecture rather than the more common GPUs on the market. Of course, even general-purpose engines can perform better on PS5, AMD, or NV. But, for these engines, they have less information about how customers will use the engines, so there's less infomation can be used to optimize. On the other side, customers using these engines often don’t have enough experience optimizing sufficiently for each platform. None of this is absolute, but I think this logic is reasonable.

For game developers using these engines, if they take optimization seriously, they typically make adjustments to lighting, LOD, loading, and model details or shaders on console platforms to achieve a similar visual effect while meeting the targeted performance goals. This is why you usually get better performance on a console at the same price point compared to a PC, aside from the subsidies provided by Sony.

> They almost all use off-the-shelf middleware and game engines that are built to support all of the platforms. The companies that do go through that effort tend to have very notable releases.

> Horizon Forbidden West needing a much better GPU on PC to run at the same level of fidelity as the PS5.

not being expected to run with variable refresh rate\interleaving and accepting 30\60 fps in best case situations?