I dont care what your computer does. Do you think your the only person that has a computer capable of doing these things?
Actually, since I'm not the only person who buys decent computers, I'm not he only person who has a decent computer to work with. That doesn't change the fact that 70% of the cost of my computer ($700) has nothing at all to do with gaming. So if I have to figure it in compared to a PS3, then I get to list all the non-gaming things it does that a PS3 doesn't. Why don't we figure in the cost of your personal PC while we're at it, even if you don't use it for gaming? Why should we? I have no idea, given that it has nothing to do with gaming, but you seem to insist upon doing it.
I spent $700 on a PC powerful enough to easily do my photo editing and occasional video editing. Even if I didn't want to do any gaming at all, I still would have spent that $700. Since I wanted to do gaming, I spent $300 to add good gaming capability to that computer. I could have easily spent $100 instead, or added the cards to a cheaper computer like my parents Athlon II X2 box, but I didn't, I added it to the $700 computer I already had. What does that $700 computer have to do with the price of my gaming? Absolutely nothing (about as much as your HDTV does, in fact).
Of course, you're desperately grasping at straws with your double standards here, just the same, and insisting that I include costs into what I spend on gaming that have nothing to do with gaming. Why? Because your an inane individual, I guess. What you're saying makes about as much sense as me asking you to figure your car into the cost of your console gaming, since your car was bought for gaming about as much as my $700 photo/video editing PC was. We'd both own these things even if we weren't gamers, so why you insist upon including such things is beyond me.
Only your last sentence was even relative to the op. Funny that your last sentence was a complete reversal of everything you've been saying so far and you finally admitted that pc's are a "higher cost". Of coarse a pc running a game at high settings looks better than a console...cost is whats being talked about.
Yes, if we use your completely non sequitur logic and insist on figuring in the cost of things not bought for gaming, that's true. If we use sound logic and only factor in the cost of things bought for gaming, then it's nowhere near true.
Of course you don't even apply your own twisted logic consistently, since you're desperately insisting that we don't treat your TV the same way that you insist we treat our non gaming hardware.
You have to upgrade pc's to continue playing pc games. You dont have to upgrade consoles.
I don't know why you'd make such an inane assumption, but this is nowhere near correct.
I have a friend who owns a Geforce 8800GS in his gaming computer. His budget tends to be small for things like gaming, though he still buys newer titles on a relatively regular basis. That card is nearly as old as the first PS3 (and older than most newer models), and it can play anything on the market. Can it play those games at high settings? No, it can't, but it makes them look a heck of a lot better than a PS3 does, just the same, and he hasn't upgraded it for years.
PC gamers don't have to upgrade. Even sporting three year old hardware, we already have machines that make games look nice, and nicer than consoles at that, and can play any game out there. Some of us choose to upgrade because we have the money to do so and like games to look nicer still (and often are hardware enthusiasts in general), but no one HAS to upgade a PC to play games, not for years. Old DX10 hardware still plays games just fine, and most games still have support for DX9. There's also more than enough computing power in any video card from the last four years to at least play a game competently. Metro 2033 is the most intensive game that I know of, and Geforce 8800s are listed as being capable of playing the game (and I've seen the game played on cards of that age).
And yes stating your opinion is a direct attack but calling others "PC only Fanboys" isnt ?
Double standards FTW
It's not the only double standard he uses by any means, but for some reason he just seems to like ad hominem attacks.
No one here has identified themselves as a "PC only" anything. In fact, I owned a Wii up until very recently, and prior to that, I've owned a console from every generation, going back to the Atari 2600 (though I only owned that system briefly, at the end of its life, when I was very young, and quickly replaced it with newer offerings from the early 1990s).
Still, if he wants to resort to poisoning the well, then I guess we can't stop him. We can only continue calling him out on it.
How come I have a Playstation, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, XBox and Xbox 360 then?
There's 4-6 years between console releases.
About the same time-frame that I update my PC gfx card. A top of the line gfx card today will be more than good enough (for me) for 3 or 4 years, acceptable for another year and then I upgrade.
Consoles do have 1 enormous advantage over PCs for gaming: The developers know exactly what the spec of my PS3 is. They don't know the spec of my PC. Console game developers can optimise their code to work on 1 very specific piece hardware whereas PC devs have to try and find a middle ground taht will run on thousands of different configurations.
My cell phone costs twice as much to use over a period of 4 years than my gaming rig. A cell phone...2x more expensive than a gaming rig. Think about that for a moment. Hell, all you smokers out there. A pack of cigarrettes a day equates to 4 (repeat after me...4) $1600 gaming rigs over the course of 4 years. One pack of smokes = 4 gaming rigs. Think about that one for a moment too.
A $1600 gaming PC really isn't all that expensive when you put it into perspective. Its pretty damn cheap actually.
I have to agree that it's less expensive than some other things, but I'm really focussing on the margin of proffit.
Considering that consoles are sold almost at cost of production (except for the Wii), there is no margin of profit on them.
What that means to consumers, overall, is just about nothing, because profit margin or no, PC hardware still offers an equal or better value to console hardware. It's a case where the point of diminshing returns is far off into the thousands of dollars (pretty much Apple computer territory) and moderate increases in price earn one enormous gains in computing power combined with the advantages of an unrestrictive platform.
The reason for this is really quite simple. Like I said before, a PS3 is $300, because a $300 computer is exactly what you get in exchange. I have a $1000 computer that happens to be my primary gaming computer, and compared to a PS3, it acts like a $1000 computer. One can easily build a gaming computer for $500 as well. The reason consoles don't present that great of a value is because they're unecessary hardware replication. When I fit my computer for gaming, what I'm doing is taking my $700 PC and adding $300 in GPUs to game with. In order to play games, I'm buying nothing but GPUs to add to the computer hardware I already have. When you buy a console, you don't use the PC hardware you already own, and you reinvent the wheel, because you don't just buy a gaming GPU, but also an entirely separate processor, RAM, case, PSU, optical drive, storate drive and motherboard.
I don't have to buy all that extra hardware; I'm just using the processor, RAM, case, PSU, optical drive, storate drive and motherboard that I already have in my home PC, and adding a couple of video cards to it. This is really true for anyone, as well, because no one with finite funds who cares about value in the first place builds/buys a home PC, and then builds/buys a separate gaming PC. They just have one for both. Console owners, on the other hand, have a home PC, but then, in essense, go buy an entire new PC just to game on, instead of simply equipping the one they have with some better GPU power.
I'm not against consoles. I've owned consoles from most generations. They're great for parties, or general situations where multiple people are present and want to play video games (since they only require a single machine, isntead of one per player). They're also just a good fit for some. They also have a good number of exclusive games per respective console. What consoles do not offer is some kind of superior value. They're a cheap gaming machine that only has the capabilities of a cheap gaming system, down to the lousy graphics.
In that case, I spent around $900 on my PC (I'll use the full cost to make that one guy happy)
I spent over $1000 on my 3 gaming consoles, but we'll take just 1... I won't even include the HDMI cable, Wi-fi adapter, or any of the extra accessories.... so $300 for the console.
I use my console for gaming about 5 hours a week... I use my PC for gaming about 20 hours a week.
Cost breakdown over a year of use:
PC: $0.87 per hour.
Console: $1.15 per hour.
So for me personally, my PC was a much better investment... If we talk about total use, not just gaming it gets even better. My PC only costs me $0.30 per hour over a year, while my console is still over $1.00 per hour.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
In that case, I spent around $900 on my PC (I'll use the full cost to make that one guy happy)
I spent over $1000 on my 3 gaming consoles, but we'll take just 1... I won't even include the HDMI cable, Wi-fi adapter, or any of the extra accessories.... so $300 for the console.
I use my console for gaming about 5 hours a week... I use my PC for gaming about 20 hours a week.
Cost breakdown over a year of use:
PC: $0.87 per hour.
Console: $1.15 per hour.
So for me personally, my PC was a much better investment... If we talk about total use, not just gaming it gets even better. My PC only costs me $0.30 per hour over a year, while my console is still over $1.00 per hour.
The cost is biased if you only count your own expenses.
Good post and one of the reasons I have drifted back further into playing console games as opposed to pc games, if a game is available on both pc and console I have been getting the console editions as I'm just sick of the graphics card rat race. I imagine once TOR launches I'll be forced to buy a new pc (most likely something middle of the road) but not until then I'm just through with the constant need to upgrade espeically for such traditionally unstable games.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Again a console is running at 1280x720 Low settings which any $50 graphics card can do.. there is no graphics card rat race if you just want console quality
Good post and one of the reasons I have drifted back further into playing console games as opposed to pc games, if a game is available on both pc and console I have been getting the console editions as I'm just sick of the graphics card rat race. I imagine once TOR launches I'll be forced to buy a new pc (most likely something middle of the road) but not until then I'm just through with the constant need to upgrade espeically for such traditionally unstable games.
but you don't have to take part in GPU advancement if you really don't want to. Just keep the PC video card you have for three or four years, and accept that you'll have to turn down settings for newer games. No matter what, it'll still look better on the console anyways.
You also forget most Platforms (wii, ps, xbox) do not make money of the sale of their system. They alot of times loose money because they want to get as many people playing their system as possible. They make most of their money by getting a cut off games sold for their system.
Also a few years ago, the PS3 was equal to a powerful highend machine. Today its midrange or maybe even low range. AOC has almost spotted trying to get it on Xbox cause the system cannot handle Conans graphics quality at an acceptable level.
Again a console is running at 1280x720 Low settings which any $50 graphics card can do.. there is no graphics card rat race if you just want console quality
That's awful to tell lies. Pc games are NOT optimized to run on 50$ cards because they require too much bandwith and/or memory processing power.
Originally posted by lunatis Originally posted by noquarter Again a console is running at 1280x720 Low settings which any $50 graphics card can do.. there is no graphics card rat race if you just want console quality
That's awful to tell lies. Pc games are NOT optimized to run on 50$ cards because they require too much bandwith and/or memory processing power.
PC games are 'optimized' by using the in game settings to achieve varying levels of graphics quality. If you turn resolution down, texture quality to low, anti-aliasing off, filtering quality to low, you've just optimized the graphics demands for a $50 graphics card. This is on the fly, personal optimization. If you leave the settings on high then of course it requires too much "bandwidth and/or memory processing power" (and of course it looks 100 times nicer too).
Console games are specifically tuned to these low settings before hand. They do, of course, get more efficient usage of the hardware present. You definitely will get more out of the 256MB of memory and Geforce 7800 GTX in a PS3 than you would running them in a PC because the developers are able to make targeted graphics concessions and coding optimizations for the available hardware.
But the efficient usage of hardware can only get you so far. By the time the PS3 launched at $500/$600 dollars the 8800GTX had already been released. You just can't make up that ground even with coding optimizations. You could've built a core2duo w/8800GTX for $600-$700 at the time the PS3 released and had superior graphics quality, or used a 7900GTX or 8800GTS to get the price down to $500-$600 with equal quality.
Today the 7800 GTX is no faster than a $50 crap card you'd throw in your grandmother's computer.
$46 after rebate, including shipping. And it's significantly faster than any video card that was on the market as of November 1, 2006 (a week before G80). That is, it's significantly faster than any video card that the console makers could have picked for the latest round of consoles. And that's could have picked, not just did pick.
If it's without rebates, then $50 really doesn't get you something very nice. It would be better to assume that you'll spend at least $80 on a gaming video card without rebates, as that will get you a Radeon HD 5670.
A good graphics card by PC gamer standards may not be purchasable at the $50 pricepoint, but a card that will beat a console's GPU easily is. I think that's more the point.
Noquarter, you mentioned earlier that on the console, Left 4 Dead 2 features a motion blur feature not available on the PC. This particular technique, used to cover up the atrocious lack of detail, is something I've seen in more than one game. In the first Mass Effect, I remember being appalled at how overpowering the film grain effect was. It felt like looking at the game through a veil of fog. Then I turned it off, and suddenly it became vastly more apparent just how aweful the game's graphics were (which, fortunately, did not detract from how awesome a game it is). The textures mostly looked like something from PC gaming in the 90s, there was no anisotropic filtering, I believe there's no anti-aliasing. You could run along, and in many places, you'd see muddy ground textures not more than twenty feet in front of you, turning into detailed textures only as you ran over them (again, reminiscent of PC games from the 90s). Even the close up textures tended to look either completely mediocre or downright terrible.
Still, aweful as the game looked compared to other PC games around in 2008, the fact that I could at least play it natively at 1920x1200 meant that it still looked vastly better than it did on the console. If anything, the biggest flaw was that the game's graphics were so tailored to console playing, that they just weren't made for that resolution, so playing in 1080P tended to bring out such flaws easily. It was just abundantly clear that the textures were not made to look sharp at anything close to true 1080P, so the game was full of sharp objects with horrendously muddy textures on them.
I just figured I'd add another example to highlight the visual differences here. It looks fine on my TV sitting 10 feet away, but that level of graphics does NOT look fine on my monitor from one foot away.
Thing is, PC gaming has always been a very expensive hobby. You dont need to buy top of the line stuff, go with something thats a year old, and has another generation of stuff after it.
Im still running a 1 gig 4870, 8 gigs of DDR2 ram, Phenom II X4 Black 3.0 ghz on a win 7 home system. I can still play anything I want. Maybe I cant play the most graphically intensive game on the highest setting at a very high resolution, but I really dont care to.
i call bullshit
A good PC nowdays can set you back $1-$2000. Doing up a car would cost you 10x that. Sailing a boat would cost you 100x that. Fishing would cost you more than that (if you take the equivalent 'level' of rods (high end)).
PC gaming is arguably one of the cheaper hobbies around and (thankfully) it also doubles up for extra utility around the house (the internet, word processing..etc)
As for PC graphics cards being expensive, no one told you to buy the latest and greatest. A lot of stuff runs well on those $100-$200 range cards. Also if you get a decent CPU, Motherboard and RAM you wont need tp upgrade for several years (aside from maybe the graphics card)
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds -Solid non level based game -Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
consoles are a cheap entry point to video gaming. but after the purchase it becomes expensive. games are the same price as pc titles yet generally offer less replayability,the consoles are proprietary- often times you cannot upgrade or customise them. and the graphics arent that good. the ps3 for example uses a 6800 nvidia chipset.
pc gaming on the other hand offers infinite customisation- pick all of your own components. also the games often have greater value due to replayability,mods, etc. not to mention all the other things a pc can do..word processing,creating home movies,decoding HD movies at 1080p onto a nice monitor/tv,pc is used to code all video games,photo manipulation, taking part in online communities,online shopping,VOIP... the possibilities are endless.
also you cant really compare the graphics card market to the console market. every single xbox/ps triple is identical..but the pc market allows you to choose the level of graphics you want. i still use my HD4850 512 from years ago and can run most games on medium/high. but if you want to spend the money the market provides cutting edge high end stuff too.
consoles: locked down and stagnant
pc: constantly evolving to provide the customer a better experience
PC's just forgot how games can be fun without the "graphics".
Little Big Planet 2, omg... best example! Or, I loved the remake of Monkey Island!
See that was mostly my point overall... why spend so much for an awesome gfx card when the difference in price is technologically negligible, just a few mhz over, when the real fun should be to spend to play the games!
First, Microsoft has given some indications that it is not in favor of supporting PC gaming. Windows Vista was a huge step back for gaming until MS finally saw that sales of its new Vista (and then Win7) would be hurt by not supporting PC gaming. Why? Because MS wanted to corner the console market. They didn't want to have a competing market with their Xbox 360.
Second, and this is more opinion then fact, component manufactures are not supporting gaming by constantly upgrading hardware. This does increase the technology but it does not tend to drive down the price. We as consumers have gotten so use to just "upgrading" that we have become lemmings to their marketing strategy of forcing the market into buying all new every few years. While this seems "good" to them, it is something that most people just find impossible to keep up with. Afterall, would you upgrade you TV set every 2 to 3 years? Not likely. Yet we, as computer freaks, just willingly shell out sometimes thousands of dollars just to get a few more fps or that faster multi-core processor. So, prices stay high. The delima is that if the PC gamers stopped supporting these hardware manufacturers, the console would when out and PC gaming would die.
PC's just forgot how games can be fun without the "graphics".
Little Big Planet 2, omg... best example! Or, I loved the remake of Monkey Island!
See that was mostly my point overall... why spend so much for an awesome gfx card when the difference in price is technologically negligible, just a few mhz over, when the real fun should be to spend to play the games!
Monkey Island is a PC title as well. In fact, there are hundreds, if not thousands of PC titles that come out every year that aren't graphically intensive at all, far more than come out on console.
Not every game is a GPU-heating fest, and even for those that are, anyone can play them without constantly upgrading their machine. PC gamers can easily follow the same upgrade schedule that console players do when they buy new consoles, especially if all you're looking for are console-level graphics.
Contrary to the mischaracterization, new hardware is always much faster than old hardware, which means that companies give you more than enough to justify the purchase price. If you don't want to take advantage of it, you don't have to, but for those of us who do, we can, and in exchange, we get added eyecandy in games that others simply have to choose to do without (which doesn't in any way affect the gameplay itself).
component manufactures are not supporting gaming by constantly upgrading hardware. This does increase the technology but it does not tend to drive down the price. We as consumers have gotten so use to just "upgrading" that we have become lemmings to their marketing strategy of forcing the market into buying all new every few years. While this seems "good" to them, it is something that most people just find impossible to keep up with. Afterall, would you upgrade you TV set every 2 to 3 years? Not likely. Yet we, as computer freaks, just willingly shell out sometimes thousands of dollars just to get a few more fps or that faster multi-core processor. So, prices stay high. The delima is that if the PC gamers stopped supporting these hardware manufacturers, the console would when out and PC gaming would die.
but that isn't true at all. Again, the price of upgrading always buys vastly better hardware, not just "slightly" better hardware, as you're implying. Do you realize that for the past four or five generations of video cards, every generation is TWICE as fast as the last? That's hardly "a few more fps".
Game makers take advantage of this to make nicer, more immersive games. If you don't want to take advantage of it, you don't have to. No one forces you to upgrade, because games always retain the ability to run on older hardware. It's a strictly optional feature where game makers offer you increasingly premium levels of graphics if you want to shell out the money for them, and if you don't want to, then you can play the games without them.
Prices aren't "high", they're right where they should be, given the cost of development of this hardware. You're acting like it's a bad thing that technology is progressing and enabling more interesting liesure use of computers, and contrary to your assertion, prices ARE coming down, all the time, in fact. The price for a given quantity of computing performance comes down every single year that a new, faster part comes out for the same price as the older, slower part.
In a few weeks, Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs are about to launch. They're the same price as Nehalem CPUs, but much faster. Intel is offering you a better product at the same price as what they could a couple of years ago. That's not a grand conspiracy to force you to spend money, that's advancement of new technology. If you don't want to take advantage, then don't, but these companies are hardly being unfair.
If anything, you should be thankful that they're constantly willing to sell better and faster stuff at the same price as previously inferior stuff.
Originally posted by Catamount http://store.steampowered.com/sub/6183/ Monkey Island is a PC title as well. In fact, there are hundreds, if not thousands of PC titles that come out every year that aren't graphically intensive at all, far more than come out on console.
Oh the last few days of Steam sales have been amazing. I bought at least 15 games. Most of them aren't graphically demanding at all. Altitude and Recettear I already loved the demos before I bought them this week.. I did pick up Aion, Bad Company 2: Vietnam and Assassin's Creed 2 though which are a bit demanding.
Monkey Island is a PC title as well. In fact, there are hundreds, if not thousands of PC titles that come out every year that aren't graphically intensive at all, far more than come out on console.
Oh the last few days of Steam sales have been amazing. I bought at least 15 games. Most of them aren't graphically demanding at all. Altitude and Recettear I already loved the demos before I bought them this week.. I did pick up Aion, Bad Company 2: Vietnam and Assassin's Creed 2 though which are a bit demanding.
Oh, you're not kidding. For something like $5, I picked up five of the better known indie games, DEFCON, Darwinia, Eufloria, Cogs and Plain Sight. Then I picked up the original Bioshock (never beaten it) and AVP for $5 each. $15 for 7 games is quite the deal. Just to give an idea, those games would normally have cost $100 altogether ($10 each for the indie games, except for Eufloria, which is $20, and then $20 each for AvP and Bioshock), so I just got $100 worth of merchandise at 85% off.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that steam is an enormous advantage for PC gamers. I used to hate Steam back in its earlier days, but now I couldn't live withou it. Almost every single day, there are amazing sales for games, usually 50% off or better (often 75% or 90% for a title or two). It's not just old games, either. Mass Effect 2 is only 11 months old, but is going for 50% off right now. AvP, which is $20 normally for a digital copy, and $5 when I purchased it two days ago, is $30 on the console in a brick and mortar store, and down to $15 only if you're willing to buy it online and wait for shipping. Good luck even finding a new copy of Bioshock (and used game discs are a real pita).
Steam is also amazing for the fact that, thanks to PC storage capabilities, I have almost no game discs. Nothing can break, and if I don't haul my "collection" with me, physically (I have a decent gaming notebook for college), it doesn't matter, because Steam does that job for me. It even acts as a multiplayer manager, allowing people to join on each others' games, irregardless of the quality of the games' built-in functionality for that (Modern Warfare 2 is just terribad there), and chat/VOIP are built in. For supported games, Steam also supports cloud saving, so I can start a game of, say, Half Life II in one place, and then pick it up on a completely different computer over my Steam account.
It's kind of like an infinitely better version of Xbox Live. Of course, it's not the only such game service either. Being on an open-platform, I can easily choose another company's version, like Stardock's Impulse, Games for Windows Marketplace (where I just picked up a copy of Age of Empires III and all expansions for less than a dollar!), DIrect2Drive, GOG, and I believe Amazon now has a comparable service too, and of course, I can use more than one at once (I presently us MS's and Steam).
Comments
Actually, since I'm not the only person who buys decent computers, I'm not he only person who has a decent computer to work with. That doesn't change the fact that 70% of the cost of my computer ($700) has nothing at all to do with gaming. So if I have to figure it in compared to a PS3, then I get to list all the non-gaming things it does that a PS3 doesn't. Why don't we figure in the cost of your personal PC while we're at it, even if you don't use it for gaming? Why should we? I have no idea, given that it has nothing to do with gaming, but you seem to insist upon doing it.
I spent $700 on a PC powerful enough to easily do my photo editing and occasional video editing. Even if I didn't want to do any gaming at all, I still would have spent that $700. Since I wanted to do gaming, I spent $300 to add good gaming capability to that computer. I could have easily spent $100 instead, or added the cards to a cheaper computer like my parents Athlon II X2 box, but I didn't, I added it to the $700 computer I already had. What does that $700 computer have to do with the price of my gaming? Absolutely nothing (about as much as your HDTV does, in fact).
Of course, you're desperately grasping at straws with your double standards here, just the same, and insisting that I include costs into what I spend on gaming that have nothing to do with gaming. Why? Because your an inane individual, I guess. What you're saying makes about as much sense as me asking you to figure your car into the cost of your console gaming, since your car was bought for gaming about as much as my $700 photo/video editing PC was. We'd both own these things even if we weren't gamers, so why you insist upon including such things is beyond me.
Only your last sentence was even relative to the op. Funny that your last sentence was a complete reversal of everything you've been saying so far and you finally admitted that pc's are a "higher cost". Of coarse a pc running a game at high settings looks better than a console...cost is whats being talked about.
Yes, if we use your completely non sequitur logic and insist on figuring in the cost of things not bought for gaming, that's true. If we use sound logic and only factor in the cost of things bought for gaming, then it's nowhere near true.
Of course you don't even apply your own twisted logic consistently, since you're desperately insisting that we don't treat your TV the same way that you insist we treat our non gaming hardware.
You have to upgrade pc's to continue playing pc games. You dont have to upgrade consoles.
I don't know why you'd make such an inane assumption, but this is nowhere near correct.
I have a friend who owns a Geforce 8800GS in his gaming computer. His budget tends to be small for things like gaming, though he still buys newer titles on a relatively regular basis. That card is nearly as old as the first PS3 (and older than most newer models), and it can play anything on the market. Can it play those games at high settings? No, it can't, but it makes them look a heck of a lot better than a PS3 does, just the same, and he hasn't upgraded it for years.
PC gamers don't have to upgrade. Even sporting three year old hardware, we already have machines that make games look nice, and nicer than consoles at that, and can play any game out there. Some of us choose to upgrade because we have the money to do so and like games to look nicer still (and often are hardware enthusiasts in general), but no one HAS to upgade a PC to play games, not for years. Old DX10 hardware still plays games just fine, and most games still have support for DX9. There's also more than enough computing power in any video card from the last four years to at least play a game competently. Metro 2033 is the most intensive game that I know of, and Geforce 8800s are listed as being capable of playing the game (and I've seen the game played on cards of that age).
Sorry, but you're just unequivocally wrong here.
It's not the only double standard he uses by any means, but for some reason he just seems to like ad hominem attacks.
No one here has identified themselves as a "PC only" anything. In fact, I owned a Wii up until very recently, and prior to that, I've owned a console from every generation, going back to the Atari 2600 (though I only owned that system briefly, at the end of its life, when I was very young, and quickly replaced it with newer offerings from the early 1990s).
Still, if he wants to resort to poisoning the well, then I guess we can't stop him. We can only continue calling him out on it.
Don't have to upgrade consoles?
How come I have a Playstation, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, XBox and Xbox 360 then?
There's 4-6 years between console releases.
About the same time-frame that I update my PC gfx card. A top of the line gfx card today will be more than good enough (for me) for 3 or 4 years, acceptable for another year and then I upgrade.
Consoles do have 1 enormous advantage over PCs for gaming: The developers know exactly what the spec of my PS3 is. They don't know the spec of my PC. Console game developers can optimise their code to work on 1 very specific piece hardware whereas PC devs have to try and find a middle ground taht will run on thousands of different configurations.
My cell phone costs twice as much to use over a period of 4 years than my gaming rig. A cell phone...2x more expensive than a gaming rig. Think about that for a moment. Hell, all you smokers out there. A pack of cigarrettes a day equates to 4 (repeat after me...4) $1600 gaming rigs over the course of 4 years. One pack of smokes = 4 gaming rigs. Think about that one for a moment too.
A $1600 gaming PC really isn't all that expensive when you put it into perspective. Its pretty damn cheap actually.
I have to agree that it's less expensive than some other things, but I'm really focussing on the margin of proffit.
https://i.imgur.com/Dc8dU3M.png
Considering that consoles are sold almost at cost of production (except for the Wii), there is no margin of profit on them.
What that means to consumers, overall, is just about nothing, because profit margin or no, PC hardware still offers an equal or better value to console hardware. It's a case where the point of diminshing returns is far off into the thousands of dollars (pretty much Apple computer territory) and moderate increases in price earn one enormous gains in computing power combined with the advantages of an unrestrictive platform.
The reason for this is really quite simple. Like I said before, a PS3 is $300, because a $300 computer is exactly what you get in exchange. I have a $1000 computer that happens to be my primary gaming computer, and compared to a PS3, it acts like a $1000 computer. One can easily build a gaming computer for $500 as well. The reason consoles don't present that great of a value is because they're unecessary hardware replication. When I fit my computer for gaming, what I'm doing is taking my $700 PC and adding $300 in GPUs to game with. In order to play games, I'm buying nothing but GPUs to add to the computer hardware I already have. When you buy a console, you don't use the PC hardware you already own, and you reinvent the wheel, because you don't just buy a gaming GPU, but also an entirely separate processor, RAM, case, PSU, optical drive, storate drive and motherboard.
I don't have to buy all that extra hardware; I'm just using the processor, RAM, case, PSU, optical drive, storate drive and motherboard that I already have in my home PC, and adding a couple of video cards to it. This is really true for anyone, as well, because no one with finite funds who cares about value in the first place builds/buys a home PC, and then builds/buys a separate gaming PC. They just have one for both. Console owners, on the other hand, have a home PC, but then, in essense, go buy an entire new PC just to game on, instead of simply equipping the one they have with some better GPU power.
I'm not against consoles. I've owned consoles from most generations. They're great for parties, or general situations where multiple people are present and want to play video games (since they only require a single machine, isntead of one per player). They're also just a good fit for some. They also have a good number of exclusive games per respective console. What consoles do not offer is some kind of superior value. They're a cheap gaming machine that only has the capabilities of a cheap gaming system, down to the lousy graphics.
I think he meant more like return on investment.
In that case, I spent around $900 on my PC (I'll use the full cost to make that one guy happy)
I spent over $1000 on my 3 gaming consoles, but we'll take just 1... I won't even include the HDMI cable, Wi-fi adapter, or any of the extra accessories.... so $300 for the console.
I use my console for gaming about 5 hours a week... I use my PC for gaming about 20 hours a week.
Cost breakdown over a year of use:
PC: $0.87 per hour.
Console: $1.15 per hour.
So for me personally, my PC was a much better investment... If we talk about total use, not just gaming it gets even better. My PC only costs me $0.30 per hour over a year, while my console is still over $1.00 per hour.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
The cost is biased if you only count your own expenses.
https://i.imgur.com/Dc8dU3M.png
Good post and one of the reasons I have drifted back further into playing console games as opposed to pc games, if a game is available on both pc and console I have been getting the console editions as I'm just sick of the graphics card rat race. I imagine once TOR launches I'll be forced to buy a new pc (most likely something middle of the road) but not until then I'm just through with the constant need to upgrade espeically for such traditionally unstable games.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Again a console is running at 1280x720 Low settings which any $50 graphics card can do.. there is no graphics card rat race if you just want console quality
but you don't have to take part in GPU advancement if you really don't want to. Just keep the PC video card you have for three or four years, and accept that you'll have to turn down settings for newer games. No matter what, it'll still look better on the console anyways.
You also forget most Platforms (wii, ps, xbox) do not make money of the sale of their system. They alot of times loose money because they want to get as many people playing their system as possible. They make most of their money by getting a cut off games sold for their system.
Also a few years ago, the PS3 was equal to a powerful highend machine. Today its midrange or maybe even low range. AOC has almost spotted trying to get it on Xbox cause the system cannot handle Conans graphics quality at an acceptable level.
Ah... finally you see the problem.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
That's awful to tell lies. Pc games are NOT optimized to run on 50$ cards because they require too much bandwith and/or memory processing power.
https://i.imgur.com/Dc8dU3M.png
PC games are 'optimized' by using the in game settings to achieve varying levels of graphics quality. If you turn resolution down, texture quality to low, anti-aliasing off, filtering quality to low, you've just optimized the graphics demands for a $50 graphics card. This is on the fly, personal optimization. If you leave the settings on high then of course it requires too much "bandwidth and/or memory processing power" (and of course it looks 100 times nicer too).
Console games are specifically tuned to these low settings before hand. They do, of course, get more efficient usage of the hardware present. You definitely will get more out of the 256MB of memory and Geforce 7800 GTX in a PS3 than you would running them in a PC because the developers are able to make targeted graphics concessions and coding optimizations for the available hardware.
But the efficient usage of hardware can only get you so far. By the time the PS3 launched at $500/$600 dollars the 8800GTX had already been released. You just can't make up that ground even with coding optimizations. You could've built a core2duo w/8800GTX for $600-$700 at the time the PS3 released and had superior graphics quality, or used a 7900GTX or 8800GTS to get the price down to $500-$600 with equal quality.
Today the 7800 GTX is no faster than a $50 crap card you'd throw in your grandmother's computer.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130533
$46 after rebate, including shipping. And it's significantly faster than any video card that was on the market as of November 1, 2006 (a week before G80). That is, it's significantly faster than any video card that the console makers could have picked for the latest round of consoles. And that's could have picked, not just did pick.
If it's without rebates, then $50 really doesn't get you something very nice. It would be better to assume that you'll spend at least $80 on a gaming video card without rebates, as that will get you a Radeon HD 5670.
A good graphics card by PC gamer standards may not be purchasable at the $50 pricepoint, but a card that will beat a console's GPU easily is. I think that's more the point.
Noquarter, you mentioned earlier that on the console, Left 4 Dead 2 features a motion blur feature not available on the PC. This particular technique, used to cover up the atrocious lack of detail, is something I've seen in more than one game. In the first Mass Effect, I remember being appalled at how overpowering the film grain effect was. It felt like looking at the game through a veil of fog. Then I turned it off, and suddenly it became vastly more apparent just how aweful the game's graphics were (which, fortunately, did not detract from how awesome a game it is). The textures mostly looked like something from PC gaming in the 90s, there was no anisotropic filtering, I believe there's no anti-aliasing. You could run along, and in many places, you'd see muddy ground textures not more than twenty feet in front of you, turning into detailed textures only as you ran over them (again, reminiscent of PC games from the 90s). Even the close up textures tended to look either completely mediocre or downright terrible.
Still, aweful as the game looked compared to other PC games around in 2008, the fact that I could at least play it natively at 1920x1200 meant that it still looked vastly better than it did on the console. If anything, the biggest flaw was that the game's graphics were so tailored to console playing, that they just weren't made for that resolution, so playing in 1080P tended to bring out such flaws easily. It was just abundantly clear that the textures were not made to look sharp at anything close to true 1080P, so the game was full of sharp objects with horrendously muddy textures on them.
I just figured I'd add another example to highlight the visual differences here. It looks fine on my TV sitting 10 feet away, but that level of graphics does NOT look fine on my monitor from one foot away.
i call bullshit
A good PC nowdays can set you back $1-$2000. Doing up a car would cost you 10x that. Sailing a boat would cost you 100x that. Fishing would cost you more than that (if you take the equivalent 'level' of rods (high end)).
PC gaming is arguably one of the cheaper hobbies around and (thankfully) it also doubles up for extra utility around the house (the internet, word processing..etc)
As for PC graphics cards being expensive, no one told you to buy the latest and greatest. A lot of stuff runs well on those $100-$200 range cards. Also if you get a decent CPU, Motherboard and RAM you wont need tp upgrade for several years (aside from maybe the graphics card)
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
consoles are a cheap entry point to video gaming. but after the purchase it becomes expensive. games are the same price as pc titles yet generally offer less replayability,the consoles are proprietary- often times you cannot upgrade or customise them. and the graphics arent that good. the ps3 for example uses a 6800 nvidia chipset.
pc gaming on the other hand offers infinite customisation- pick all of your own components. also the games often have greater value due to replayability,mods, etc. not to mention all the other things a pc can do..word processing,creating home movies,decoding HD movies at 1080p onto a nice monitor/tv,pc is used to code all video games,photo manipulation, taking part in online communities,online shopping,VOIP... the possibilities are endless.
also you cant really compare the graphics card market to the console market. every single xbox/ps triple is identical..but the pc market allows you to choose the level of graphics you want. i still use my HD4850 512 from years ago and can run most games on medium/high. but if you want to spend the money the market provides cutting edge high end stuff too.
consoles: locked down and stagnant
pc: constantly evolving to provide the customer a better experience
PC's just forgot how games can be fun without the "graphics".
Little Big Planet 2, omg... best example! Or, I loved the remake of Monkey Island!
See that was mostly my point overall... why spend so much for an awesome gfx card when the difference in price is technologically negligible, just a few mhz over, when the real fun should be to spend to play the games!
https://i.imgur.com/Dc8dU3M.png
Couple of thoughts:
First, Microsoft has given some indications that it is not in favor of supporting PC gaming. Windows Vista was a huge step back for gaming until MS finally saw that sales of its new Vista (and then Win7) would be hurt by not supporting PC gaming. Why? Because MS wanted to corner the console market. They didn't want to have a competing market with their Xbox 360.
Second, and this is more opinion then fact, component manufactures are not supporting gaming by constantly upgrading hardware. This does increase the technology but it does not tend to drive down the price. We as consumers have gotten so use to just "upgrading" that we have become lemmings to their marketing strategy of forcing the market into buying all new every few years. While this seems "good" to them, it is something that most people just find impossible to keep up with. Afterall, would you upgrade you TV set every 2 to 3 years? Not likely. Yet we, as computer freaks, just willingly shell out sometimes thousands of dollars just to get a few more fps or that faster multi-core processor. So, prices stay high. The delima is that if the PC gamers stopped supporting these hardware manufacturers, the console would when out and PC gaming would die.
Let's party like it is 1863!
http://store.steampowered.com/sub/6183/
Monkey Island is a PC title as well. In fact, there are hundreds, if not thousands of PC titles that come out every year that aren't graphically intensive at all, far more than come out on console.
Not every game is a GPU-heating fest, and even for those that are, anyone can play them without constantly upgrading their machine. PC gamers can easily follow the same upgrade schedule that console players do when they buy new consoles, especially if all you're looking for are console-level graphics.
Contrary to the mischaracterization, new hardware is always much faster than old hardware, which means that companies give you more than enough to justify the purchase price. If you don't want to take advantage of it, you don't have to, but for those of us who do, we can, and in exchange, we get added eyecandy in games that others simply have to choose to do without (which doesn't in any way affect the gameplay itself).
component manufactures are not supporting gaming by constantly upgrading hardware. This does increase the technology but it does not tend to drive down the price. We as consumers have gotten so use to just "upgrading" that we have become lemmings to their marketing strategy of forcing the market into buying all new every few years. While this seems "good" to them, it is something that most people just find impossible to keep up with. Afterall, would you upgrade you TV set every 2 to 3 years? Not likely. Yet we, as computer freaks, just willingly shell out sometimes thousands of dollars just to get a few more fps or that faster multi-core processor. So, prices stay high. The delima is that if the PC gamers stopped supporting these hardware manufacturers, the console would when out and PC gaming would die.
but that isn't true at all. Again, the price of upgrading always buys vastly better hardware, not just "slightly" better hardware, as you're implying. Do you realize that for the past four or five generations of video cards, every generation is TWICE as fast as the last? That's hardly "a few more fps".
Game makers take advantage of this to make nicer, more immersive games. If you don't want to take advantage of it, you don't have to. No one forces you to upgrade, because games always retain the ability to run on older hardware. It's a strictly optional feature where game makers offer you increasingly premium levels of graphics if you want to shell out the money for them, and if you don't want to, then you can play the games without them.
Prices aren't "high", they're right where they should be, given the cost of development of this hardware. You're acting like it's a bad thing that technology is progressing and enabling more interesting liesure use of computers, and contrary to your assertion, prices ARE coming down, all the time, in fact. The price for a given quantity of computing performance comes down every single year that a new, faster part comes out for the same price as the older, slower part.
In a few weeks, Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs are about to launch. They're the same price as Nehalem CPUs, but much faster. Intel is offering you a better product at the same price as what they could a couple of years ago. That's not a grand conspiracy to force you to spend money, that's advancement of new technology. If you don't want to take advantage, then don't, but these companies are hardly being unfair.
If anything, you should be thankful that they're constantly willing to sell better and faster stuff at the same price as previously inferior stuff.
Oh the last few days of Steam sales have been amazing. I bought at least 15 games. Most of them aren't graphically demanding at all. Altitude and Recettear I already loved the demos before I bought them this week.. I did pick up Aion, Bad Company 2: Vietnam and Assassin's Creed 2 though which are a bit demanding.
Oh, you're not kidding. For something like $5, I picked up five of the better known indie games, DEFCON, Darwinia, Eufloria, Cogs and Plain Sight. Then I picked up the original Bioshock (never beaten it) and AVP for $5 each. $15 for 7 games is quite the deal. Just to give an idea, those games would normally have cost $100 altogether ($10 each for the indie games, except for Eufloria, which is $20, and then $20 each for AvP and Bioshock), so I just got $100 worth of merchandise at 85% off.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that steam is an enormous advantage for PC gamers. I used to hate Steam back in its earlier days, but now I couldn't live withou it. Almost every single day, there are amazing sales for games, usually 50% off or better (often 75% or 90% for a title or two). It's not just old games, either. Mass Effect 2 is only 11 months old, but is going for 50% off right now. AvP, which is $20 normally for a digital copy, and $5 when I purchased it two days ago, is $30 on the console in a brick and mortar store, and down to $15 only if you're willing to buy it online and wait for shipping. Good luck even finding a new copy of Bioshock (and used game discs are a real pita).
Steam is also amazing for the fact that, thanks to PC storage capabilities, I have almost no game discs. Nothing can break, and if I don't haul my "collection" with me, physically (I have a decent gaming notebook for college), it doesn't matter, because Steam does that job for me. It even acts as a multiplayer manager, allowing people to join on each others' games, irregardless of the quality of the games' built-in functionality for that (Modern Warfare 2 is just terribad there), and chat/VOIP are built in. For supported games, Steam also supports cloud saving, so I can start a game of, say, Half Life II in one place, and then pick it up on a completely different computer over my Steam account.
It's kind of like an infinitely better version of Xbox Live. Of course, it's not the only such game service either. Being on an open-platform, I can easily choose another company's version, like Stardock's Impulse, Games for Windows Marketplace (where I just picked up a copy of Age of Empires III and all expansions for less than a dollar!), DIrect2Drive, GOG, and I believe Amazon now has a comparable service too, and of course, I can use more than one at once (I presently us MS's and Steam).