A tremendous number of last-generation titles aren't going to be effectively multi-threaded so they're going to bottleneck on a single CPU core. The same game designed from the ground up today would either be heavily threaded to take advantage of 8-core systems or make extensive use of GPU compute for computationally taxing work.
... but remasters are almost invariably a gamble that with minimal costs you can make a decent profit off modest sales. That equation goes south quickly if you need to put a lot of time and energy into rearchitecting existing code for a very different system. So you get games that leave most cores idle while running just well enough to generate sales.
Even dice, arguably the most competent developer around when it comes to multithreading games, and a pioneer when it comes to that, still can't get their lod and draw distance up to par in their games.
What's the standout difference in battlefield 1 pc vs console footage? The pop in
If even they can't do it, and other S tier devs like kojima's team with mgs5,ubisoft with their AC games and techland with dying light can't do it, what chance do all the A tier, B tier and indie devs have?
The logic that it can be worked around by AAA devs (and it's unproven btw) with enough optimisation is the same kind of crap people said during the ps3 gen with the cell cpu.
If it's a pain in the ass and requires extraordinary talent to pull off then it means that the vast majority of games will suffer. And they have so far.
There's this logical fallacy that if a handful of exclusives can achieve something extra with the hardware that you somehow don't need better hardware. I guess the other 90 percent of games don't matter.
Fact is a better cpu with better performance and also better single threaded performance would make the life of all developers a whole lot easier. 60fps games would be a lot more common too.