PS4/XBONE mostly run games at 720p or 900p at 30fps, which isn't great by PC standards. A new $150-$200 dedicated card would be able to hit 1080p/60fps with comparable quality settings. In the sub-$600 space consoles are a bargain, but they have a lot of limitations compared to a slightly more expensive PC.

> On a PC, a CPU and GPU combo with comparable specs at the time of release would be what? 3x that?

Its hard to actually figure that out since the Xbone / PS4 APUs are pretty shoddy Jaguar 8 cores with mid-tier GPU class shader clusters tacked on. The A10-7850k right now retails around $125-$130. It has four Steamroller cores at 3.7ghz unlocked, versus 8 Jaguar 1.75ghz cores on the Xbone one. It has 512 shaders at 720mhz, compared to the xbones 768 at 853mhz. The more expensive 7870k just ups the frequency at stock to 866mhz. Of course the GPU is also unlocked on these parts so you can just run that 7850 at identical or higher frequencies to the xbone (I have a 5800k running at 4.5ghz / 1066mhz cpu / gpu respectively, it just takes a better cooler).

The more significant difference is the 32MB of embedded ram on the xbone SoC, whereas you need expensive 2400mhz+ DDR3 to really get results out of Kaveri, and that still isn't going to come close to the throughput of the xbone.

All things considered it probably exceeds the Xbone in theoretical CPU performance by quite a bit, whereas real world it matters less since game engines can just hyper-optimize their pipelines across the eight cores to minimize the benefit of four beefy fast cores.

So to answer your question... it would probably cost $150 retail if AMD made an APU that just dedicated more die to GPU and got, say, 1024 shader cores on there at 1ghz. Basically an r7 370 on die. The Xbone almost kinda has an r7 360 on board running at 4/5 the frequency, by comparison. Then they just throw four or eight Carrizo cores in there (the mid range not-desktop not-mobile skews). The 370 is basically a faster 265 (same chip) and those are selling for $100 on the lower end, probably $90 without shrouds, and probably $80 at break even sales. And you don't need to fab the PCB or bake in any dram, so the per-volume costs of those shader cores is probably half that. You could even throw some embedded dram in there to make the gpu faster like the xbone part for probably $20 averaged.

And when I say $150, I mean releases for $150 MSRP and sees price cuts putting it at Xbone rates or lower within months.

> I buy mid-range video cards exclusively and that's a good $150-200 with tax right there. I can't imagine also getting a competitive CPU tossed in for that amount. Hell, my PC can't play much at 1080p and the consoles pretty much play everything at 1080p.

Well that GPU is expensive because its not just a socketed GPU processor, its the ram, its the video bus, its a pci bus, its capacitors and voltage regulation, its the pcb, shroud, aluminum cooler, fan, etc. Just CPU fabs are pretty inexpensive compared to the complexity of a discrete GPU part. And $50 - $60 CPUs that blow the Jaguar cores in the xbone out of the water (Pentium G3258, Athlon 860k) are already available.

And a lot of console games this generation are not releasing at 1080p. Some are still upscaling 720 or 900 to 1080 because these consoles have modest performance specs. At release the 360 / ps3 had CPUs and GPUs competitive with some of the best in class hardware. When the Xbone and PS4 released they were already budget tier in both. And remember, console games are using lower resolution textures, lower view distances, lower poly count models, reduced or no AA, minimal particle effects, no fancy shadow effects, etc because one, you cannot really see the difference between medium tier and max tier graphics at ten feet away, and two, because these consoles are not capable of performing anywhere close to what discrete desktop class graphics cards dating back to 2010 could achieve.