You should watch Digital Foundry's Watchdogs Legion study, to see what kind of quality consoles give.
Thanks for the link, Digital Foundry is awesome.
The video shows that 2060 Super cards have better raytracing than the consoles on this particular game. This is fine, Watch Dogs Legion is a
ray-tracing showcase for nVidia where every surface is reflective on purpose.
Those reflections are really beautiful on PC, but overall the game is not, just look at those ugly pipes everywhere. It doesn't hold a candle to the
Unreal 5 demo, and it shows: as said in the DF video, WD:L is built on top of the same old engine as the previous games.
It's certainly not using
Mesh Shaders and Sampler Feedback like the U5 Demo. Those, combined with a fast SSD on an optimized path to GPU memory, are the real game changers exclusive to the consoles for now. Just watch the Mark Cerny PS5 presentation again, when he talks about
assets streaming. Once the usage of this kind of technique becomes common, current PCs will have to adapt somehow.
Let me put it another way: the launch of the new consoles is one of those very few events where we are guaranteed to have games using more VRAM going forward, and the best nVidia could do at the 700USD price point and below was LESS memory than the 3 years old 1080 Ti.
Now, about saying that consoles are second rate hardware... maybe Nintendo consoles, because the Series X and the PS5 are quite something. The Series X
consumes as much power as a
2060 Super alone (around 160w), while including 8 Zen2 cores (while not the latest, they're quite recent considering that game consoles have a large gestation period) plus really fast SSDs, chipset, and a GPU that AFAWK loses to a 2060S on RT but is pretty
close to a 2080 on rasterisation. Not bad really for a fixed target that will be optimized to death in the coming years.
So, the question then is how are PCs going to implement this same kind of asset streaming? Having more VRAM and being more aggresive prefetching data? Having PCIEx SSDs doing direct memory transfers to GPU memory using SAM? Using lower quality assets?
If you can upgrade your computer every year then this is not a problem, and I'd be glad for you. Unfortunately I know I can't upgrade so often, so I'd be really p***ed to spend 700USD on a video card just to end up using lower quality assets.