The issue with PC hardware is that it's just too varied to get really close to the metal. The deeper you get, after all, the more different the various GPU architectures become. Consoles, on the other hand, are all identical, so you can do the most unportable bitfucking to get the absolute most out of the hardware. This is also the reason why it takes years for games to really start to shine on a console: it takes that long for game developers to really get to know all the nitty-gritty details that just do not exist on the PC.
Console games often look mediocre despite the above because console hardware is far cheaper, and thus simply less powerful, than the hardware in high end gaming PCs, despite the fact that consoles benefit from economies of scale, and are priced at a loss to boot. It is not fair to compare the way a game looks on a $2000 PC to the way it looks on a $400 console.
Console games often look mediocre despite the above because console hardware is far cheaper, and thus simply less powerful, than the hardware in high end gaming PCs, despite the fact that consoles benefit from economies of scale, and are priced at a loss to boot. It is not fair to compare the way a game looks on a $2000 PC to the way it looks on a $400 console.