Ehm between the UI (elaborate lua stuff similar to mmos) and the thousands of entities to keep track of in the map (infestation, the many, many AI units like macs and babblers and whips etc, the buildings, item drops etc) the game actually has a good reason to be demanding on the CPU.
There is nothing even remotely similar on the consoles.
NS2 is not poorly coded, it uses 3 threads (most modern games only use 2 anyhow, they are just designed for consoles and not demanding on the cpu at all) , with very few games such as sc2 and bf3 actually being able to use more than 2 properly.
- game logic (the entities, the AI etc) run on one thread, this is the case in most games, and THIS is where ns2 has so much more going on than most other games, and is why it is so demanding.
-rendering (objects etc) run on a seperate thread, the engine supports multithreading for rendering but since the game logic is where the majority of the processing happens, having more cores will not linearly scale performance at all (obviously)
-prediction (netcode related) runs on a seperate thread, accounts for a small amount of processing but does scale up in late game as more shit is going on, having more cpu cores helps performance here
But obviously having strong single core performance is important in this game as it is needed to run the game logic, you need one core to be able to keep up with the game logic, else the other cores will just be waiting on that one core and you won't see the benifits.
(but again a decent amount of (non game logic) processing IS offloaded to other cores, which does help a lot with performance as the 1 core can spend 100 percent of time on the game logic.
If the game was poorly programmed it would run on one thread, it doesn't, and it isn't.
My point stands : ns2 is not possible on the consoles, not even close ,especially considering a single modern cpu core is much more powerful than all 3 xbox 360 cores combined.
Making the game logic multithreaded would still not allow the game to run on the 360.
If ns2 were designed as a multiplatform game it would not have released in it's current form , it would have the mechanics of ns1 instead. (no dynamic infestation, no elaborate UI, no power nodes mechanic)
Another example of design limitations is that the cpu intensive lua code for the ui is why ns2 has mod support to begin with, no lua no mods in this game.
The things you miss out on but never know about if they never happen , eh.
That is the point I was making, a better cpu allows for more elaborate/interesting/new game mechanics, and the cpus in ps4/xb1 means there will be certain things we will not see next gen, that we would have seen if they had had better cpus.
This is why bf3 on consoles only supported 24 players, same exact reason.
Next gen there will be the equivalent to 24 player battlefield in some games which get decent pc ports, but most games will just be from the ground up be designed around the limitations to begin with.
That is why every little bit of increase on the cpu front helps.
The 'gpgpu' shit is only useful for particles and some physics and some tesselation, it won't help for the vast majority of calculations that currently happen (and will continue to happen) on the cpu.
So yeah, enjoy the next gen equivalent of 24 player battlefield 3 (comprehensive reading before replying please, before you go battlefield 4 has 64 players on consoles) with shiny gpugpu particles, instead of meaningful gameplay mechanics.