Alright... Its safe to assume you have your wires crossed.
You are technically correct, but getting some of your details wrong.
Current-gen games, or any multiplatform game you are seeing across consoles and PC, ARE BUILT, not FOR, but WITH the lowest performance platform in mind. And the three primary things that dictate what that lowest performant platform is are CPU, RAM quantity, and Storage medium. You simply can't go around that. You have to design your entire engine around those three pillars, or else you end up with a game that would require a ridiculous amount of retooling to allow you porting it to another platform.
That is why your rez point falls flat, because that's the one thing in all this that is scalable. The GPU is actually the least important part of your ability to have games on multiple platforms. Why? because all you would need to do is drop the rez to make it fit. But you can't make an engine that requires 60% of 7 ryzen 3 CPU cores running at 3.5Ghz and expect the same engine to run on a jaguar CPU. You cannot build an engine that deals with 8GB of active RAM at over 400GB/s of bandwidth and has a RAM scrapheap of around 6GB and expect that to fit into a 5GB total RAM budget.
The bar gets raised every single time new consoles come out. Thats simply because even though games are released across consoles and PC, the majority of the sales are always with the consoles. Devs go where the money is. With next-gen, the new bar is going to be at least 8 core Ryzen CPU, at least 24GB of total RAM(16GB CPU + 8GB GPU) and at least an NVMe SSD capable of speeds over 2GB/s. If you are gaming on the PC and you have anything less than that, your experience would be worse on PC than it would be on consoles.
With regards to your power gap theory... as I have already surmised, when it comes to a GPU difference, it simply comes down to resolution tweaks. Look at it this way, you are either doing everything at the same resolution across both consoles and then having the weaker one running at a lower framerate, or you are keeping the frame rate fixed, doing everything else the same, and dropping the rez on the weaker console. Its really that simple. Pixel pushing doesn't come free. I would think you would know this, but RT cost is also directly tied to how many pixels you are pushing. So it would also scale up r down with your resolution.
And yes, how important this is to people would vary... but good luck trying to spot the difference between native 2160p and native 1980p.
