You're forgetting that you get a lot more out of the same horsepower on a console than you do out of a PC. You're not running a full blown OS that requires a fe

You're forgetting that you get a lot more out of the same horsepower on a console than you do out of a PC. You're not running a full blown OS that requires a few gigs of ram and a bunch of hardware cycles, nor are you writing to a really high level API. Game makers are writing to one set of hardware that they can really optimize for. A Steambox would not significantly higher hardware to achieve the same level of graphical performance. This is why consoles are still producing pretty good looking games with 512 MBs of ram.