Yikes. Makes bad console ports especially underwhelming. Just recently have I encountered any games that even pretend to use the abundant resources available to them on PC - and of course they are PC exclusives, like Total War Warhammer.
Yup, you wouldn't believe the amount of pain you see from doing a port from PC -> X360. Malloc is not heavily optimized since with limited memory you usually allocate up front. Lots of PC games are allocation heavy since it's fast on the desktop and large parts of major subsystems need to be rewritten to be console friendly.
I was thinking more the other way around. Slow, clunky, low-res console-first games that labor to get 30 fps while using a tiny fraction of the available CPU, GPU and RAM when ported to PC.
Ah, I misread it. There's a very good chance you're just seeing the development engine that has very little optimization since ports are usually an afterthought.
Either way they're very different environments. For instance you usually have a unified memory model on most consoles where on PC you have to shuffle textures across a memory bus to the GPU. Leads you to optimize for different things(although most ports I know of were done with a skeleton team).
