Trey

Next gen consoles are today's PCs.

Mal

Next gen consoles are yesterday's PCs. My "PC of today" can run Skyrim on Ultra High at 50-60fps and 1080p.

Trey

Sounds expensive. I have no idea of Skyrim's requirements, or your monitor resolution, but when you say all that my brain thinks "+1000 dollar rig".

When I said PC of today, I was thinking of something more affordable to the masses. I know budget rigs are more expensive than consoles will ever be, but it's where the "average gamer" is, and whom devs target. So those PCs will be what next gen consoles will be comparable to, but top flight 2500+ behemoths that can play Crysis on high with 60 fps on two 1080p monitors while Firefox and iTunes run in the background with music playing, without breaking a sweat, do exist today. But those are more like PCs of the future's future.

ACt

One wonders if the console manufacturers are going to allow for system rebuilds so users can upgrade as the games get larger and more complex, because by starting low and then within two years putting out games that require you to buy a new drive for your console is just the kind of forward thinking business sense that billionaires are looking for.

__________________
It's amazing to me that, unlike in the real world, people on the internet will wear "everyone thinks I'm a moron" as a badge of honour.

Numinous

Not really. I have an average PC and it can run a new game (like Skyrim) on maximum definition with no problems, it only starts to hiccup if I use any other demanding program. It's just a matter of keeping your PC memory clean and spend a few bucks on hardware for better performance (even a new cooling system does wonders and it's cheap).

__________________

Jaxon

You're underestimating today's PCs, Trey.

My PC is a Dell from 2008. All I've done to it is put in a GT9400, a graphics card from 2008 that I got for free (thanks Artan), and upgraded the RAM from 2GB to 4GB. I can run stuff like Fallout: New Vegas above 720p, at high settings, with a better framerate than consoles. Might not be the best example, since Gamebryo games look like shit, but my point remains.

Anyone that built a half-decent PC today would outclass the proposed "base specs" of next-gen consoles easily. I'm a big believer in 60fps as standard during videogames. Devs are not, since there's a huge misguided movement towards making games look like movies, and since movies run at sub 30fps, that's apparently good enough. No. That's okay for films since the frame rate acts somewhat as a barrier between the viewer and the film, and it makes a noticeable difference to the way we interpret cinema. With videogames, you either want responsiveness or immersion.

Call of Duty is the biggest selling videogame of the modern era, and it runs at 60fps even on consoles. Take that as you will.

Spiegel

I have an NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 video card with 1 GB GDDR5 of onboard memory, 8GB 1600 DDR3 RAM, an AMD Phenom II Quadcore 3.2GHz CPU. I'm basically going to buy Skyrim today but I also have a PS3. Would you guys recommend PC or PS3 for the better experience?

__________________
"Inherited will, the destiny of the age, and the dreams of its people. These are things that will not be stopped. As long as people continue to pursue the meaning of freedom, these things will never cease to be!"
-Gol D. Roger

*Ex-Kakashi87*

Axiom

I'd say PC for sure. Higher graphic quality to start, but the big sell is the modding capabilities. The inventory management mod is fucking light years better then that obtrusive stock version.

Edit:
You can easily build rig that'll surpass a console if you shop smart. I can hit pricewatch.com right now and mock up relatively competitive computer for under the launch price of a PS3.

Shrike

Whatever happens, I will always stick with the PC. The only thing I like about the consoles is the controller (PS to be exact), but I use it for PC anyway. There is nothing a good PC can't do.

I am not sure though that I hate going from 60fps to 30fps. I am not that much of a gamer as you guys are, and my PC sucks ass (I hope to buy a new one soon), but I am hanging on my roommates PC often, and I can see the difference, but that's far from being the main thing in the game for me. There are exceptions, not gonna bullshit though. For example, new DMC will be 30 whereas the DMC4 was 60, because the environment will change a lot, and I am sure that it won't be a bad game at all, I just wonder if you can make the game that requires as much skill from the player as you can make the one which runs on 60fps. You know, with the timing and all.

Demi-God

That graphics card I gave to James I used to run games like Darksiders and Borderlands on, and even after I got a new one I didn't have to go to the top end to get good results, I bought a graphics card for about £60 and can run most of my games on pretty high settings.

The PC I have now I bought for about £600 back in 2009 and it still runs amazingly well.

When you keep in mind the price of the games you can get on PC these days, the sheer amount of stuff you can do on it that you can't on consoles, the usual minimal cost of repair or upgrade compared to the price of a console, attachments (granted you also have to get some for the PC, a monitor comes to mind), price of new games, the actual hardware you get for the price, the repair costs sometimes costing as much as a new bloody console (gone through this before myself), there's just no doubt that even cost wise a PC is a lot better.

The next gen consoles will most likely do what my 2009 PC does but with a few gimmicks to help polish the turd.

Though I still want a PS Vita.

Nerox

Got a better PC than Artan and paid 600€, bought just recently:

Raedon HD6870

Phenom II X4 3,4GB (some black edition thing)

4GB Ram and a decent Motherboard

So it is quite affordable and you can always power-up your CPU or GPU or RAM if needed.

manta

This is the best time to buy/build a gaming PC IMO, ram is cheap, there isn't that much of a leap in graphics and most games are very well optimized.


I still rock out the old games more though. Fable is awesome thanks Mal.

__________________

Axiom

RAM, has for the longest time had the best price to improved performance ratio. But nowadays it doesn't really matter. There shouldn't be any appreciable difference from say 8gigs to 16gigs.

The biggest thing pigeon holding computers is the Hard drive. Even before SSD was really around much, in the mid-late 90's. I always thought of magnetic HDD's as primitive and ridiculous. Especially when adjacent to processors with billions of stifle transistors, it makes no sense. Why we would be using this ridiculous spinning disks with a magnetic flying head hovering above it with gforce sensors to haphazardly reposition the pin. I don't know... When you start looking at all the devices that are required to make it function. There are so many things that had to be engineered around make it work. It's backwards engineering, is what it is.

I'd put off my dream of owning a jetpack for a couple of years if I could get cheap 2TB SSD in all my devices.

Jaxon

PC makes good games better. That's the main reason I prefer them. I mean, I play a lot of games on console. Let's take Fallout: New Vegas again, since it's one of my favourite games of the last 10 years. I played the shit out of it on console. Must be 200-odd hours or something. I bought all of the DLC, on top of the game itself which was full price, the day before it actually came out. Didn't regret it.

I bought the same game, again, with all the DLC, on PC a few weeks ago. It cost £13-ish for exactly the same stuff.

Except now I have massively reduced loading times, better framerate and graphics, and the crowning jewel, mods. Mods can make a bad game playable (Oblivion), and a good game even better. The first thing I did before I booted up New Vegas on PC was download a mod that adds eyepatches. I mean, holy shit. Game automatically even better. After playing vanilla for a few hours, I modded it with Project Nevada. Now I'm replaying a game I've already played the shit out of, and it's a much different experience. It's awesome.

tl;dr mods are awesome, and PC is superior.

Nerox

What's also holding CPUs in general back, is the cooling. Most of the newst chips work on full capacity only in -200°C or something.

Also, agreed, PC > consoles.