[TheMailMan78]

Originally Posted by McSteel

You're all forgetting that games written for consoles are done in assembly as much as possible. The one strength of a console is it's uniformity. There's only one possible choice of hardware, so you don't go through drivers and unknowns, but code directly for well-known hardware, shedding some pretty significant overhead and inefficiency.

A well-executed APU with shared GPU and CPU cache could be a rather potent tool in the hands of a skilled coder. Having an engine that never fetches GPU instructions and mesh data from RAM, only using it for immediately needed variables for final rendering, and only looking in VRAM for raw texture data would mean it executes an order of magnitude faster than a typical Direct3D title. Add a bit of driverless low-level access to all registers and shaders, and you have a machine that could very well render at 120 FPS constant. 240, I'm not sure about, but I suppose it's doable...

Doesn't matter how optimize the code is if the hardware isn't there to push it. APU's are damn nice but they are still APU's and cannot hold a candle to a current mid-range dedicated GPU. Cannot substitute horsepower with skill.