

I had to refund armored core 6 because the first boss fight stuttered so much. I have a 3080, so not the best but definitely no slouch. No matter what settings I tweaked, it’d always drop to slideshow performance for 1-2 seconds at a time. Acceptable in a cheaper title, maybe, but not on a full price game.
Storage data structures. Database tables are designed for fast read/write. Excel is designed for fast simultaneous parallel computation.
To get a sense of what this looks like, you can read more about their data structures; Databases typically store data in what’s called a “B Tree” and spreadsheets typically store as a format that can be easily converted into a “Directed Acyclic Graph” (although Excel lets you turn off the “acyclic” part if you allow circular references).
Although, with Excel specifically, there’s probably not much difference since it has some database functionality now.