Because of these reasons:
"Only real "Lower than Low" are reflections but it's perfectly clear
why looking at how absolutely awful they look maxed out on PC.
On Consoles SSR only purpose was to enrich the perfectly placed cubemaps (tons of them,
everywere). Their use it's extremely limited, and tastefully added as you never really notice them. In short reflections on Consoles are working as they should, they never draw attention to them, and never appear/disapper all of a sudden because all they do is add (soft) detail to the cubemaps, or give some life to window's glass.
On PC higher reflections settings are a fucking mess. They look super blocky and ugly and glitchy because they were never meant to be seen that way, and simply destroy any kind of immersion whenever they are on screen.
On Consoles
v.1.00 uses Ultra Textures, Ultra Geometry, Ultra Draw-Distances, better Ambient Occlusion than any setting on PC
, additional light sources, better facial hair and so on
.
I'm really not sure what the hell is up with the AO in v.100, but it's by far the best AO i've ever seen that's not RT.
Every version after that just implements a regular kind of SSAO, totally missing the kind of pre-rendered look AO have in version 1.00, and this includes the PC settings.
It's a whole different beast, no way around it, and while there aren't many comparisons using v.1.00 out there unfortunately, an example can be seen on Arthur's face here for example.
And resolution aside the most notable differences between Pro and Base are these ones:
Pro:
Base:
Of course PC version is still recommended for 60fps (altough not perfect, as some animations are still 30fps), water physics, long shadows, foliage resolution, far object's texture resolution.. but if there was a way to play 1.00 on Series X at 60fps, it would be without a doubt the best version of the game."
And these are base PS4 settings, post downgrade.