It is a bit of both. Instead of 720P may be it should be 900p with some compromise elsewhere I think like textures. But no amount of programming skills would get boss battles at 1080P 60fps on PS5. We will see how the PC handles it next year but this engine seems taxing on the hardware.
DF tested Spiderman on PC with a 4090 last year and found that it was topping out at 65 fps with RT, native 4k and all bells and whistles with a zen 2 3600 CPU which is roughly on par with the PS5.
They then switched out the CPU with a top of the line 13900k and the framerate shot up to 129 fps.
Is Insominac bad at coding? Is Nixxes? Or is it the hardware? lol
I am all for criticizing lazy devs but I agree no amount of programming skills will overcome a hardware deficit. If that was true, ND wouldve been able to run uncharted 4 at 1080p 60 fps like they had originally claimed and demonstrated. They are literally the best in the business and they couldnt overcome it.
I say lets wait for these games to come out on PC. Gotham Knights, Hogwarts, Star Wars and Redfall have some really poor CPU utilization that explain their poor performance on consoles. we might see the same thing for Starfield and FF16.