From what I can tell, AAA devs typically target compatibility with consoles first, usually whatever is latest generation at the anticipated release date for the

From what I can tell, AAA devs typically target compatibility with consoles first, usually whatever is latest generation at the anticipated release date for their game. And these are equivalent to mid-range gaming rigs at best. Then they work on PC compatibility afterwards and poorly optimize performance of their assets against a common GPU compatibility layer that adjusts the features it enables (if they exist in this version of what's likely a shared underlying game engine) based on hardware compatibility. If we're very lucky, the game will get tested against a wide range of hardware. Sane defaults for GPU feature flags based on detection of hardware capability and the results of that testing will result in a default user experience that doesn't need manual adjustment. If we're lucky. So tl;dr, they're not targeting the top 1% of hardware. Typically they just screw things up and don't catch it. But higher end hardware will handle poor optimization better and provide a better experience. So it can feel like they're 'targeting' that hardware when really its a poorly optimized port.