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Or really just two new consoles hitting the market and everyone is losing their shit bashing whichever they don't like. I've been slacking in my current uptake on console shenanigans because WoW got it's fucking hooks back into me again (but I finally got my Nightslayer transmog set complete, so it's all ok). I did manage to read up on some more background this weekend when I was sitting in queues and it's sad that I pretty much go to Forbes to listen to people blather on about how 720p and 1080p are cutting edge.

I left this article thinking: why the fuck don't these people who crow about graphics just build/buy a damn gaming PC? It isn't hard and it's not hideously expensive like it used to be and they seem just as dedicated to gaming as any scruffy PC guy. So, Forbes, being Forbes just kind of came out with another article which highlights why I like their writers so much:

The rumors are swirling. Battlefield 4 will be 720p on Xbox One, and the rarely-seen 900p on PS4. Call of Duty: Ghosts will be basically the same, but 1080p on PS4. The list of next-gen game rumors and speculation over frame rates and resolutions goes on and on. And nobody’s talking thanks to various contracts, NDAs, and so forth.

As Paul mentioned earlier, if there is a difference in resolution for the Xbox One and PS4 versions of a game like Call of Duty: Ghosts, most people probably won’t notice or care. The better textures and animations will make next-gen games look decidedly better than their current-gen counterparts regardless of their resolution. On a big-screen TV the difference is certainly going to be hard to spot.

To be honest, I was among those who believed next-gen signaled the dawn of 1080p as a standard in video games. But if this doesn’t turn out to be the case, I’m not sure it will actually matter.

More to the point, if you’re the type of gamer who really cares about resolution you should probably not be too attached to consoles to begin with. There are videos out there already showing Battlefield 4 running in 4K resolution on a gaming PC. That’s four times 1080p, all packed into one (very expensive) desktop monitor playing on a (very expensive) gaming rig.

I’m sure it looks awesome, too, though my 1080p desktop monitor can’t really show me how good a 4k game looks on an internet video. Then again, I did see the Battlefield 4 reveal played on a decked out gaming PC and projected onto the big screen. And it was monumental, graphics-wise. It’s not every day you get to see (alas, I didn’t get to play) a video game at a movie theater.

But I digress.

The point is that consoles aren’t really about graphics. The Xbox One and PS4 will make games look much better than they do now, but they still won’t hold a candle to gaming PCs. In two years graphics cards for PCs will leave the new consoles well in the dust.

Consoles are about three things: convenience, exclusivity, and the couch. They’re convenient because they simply plug and play. There’s no fuss. All games made for a console simply work without fiddling, drivers updates, and so forth. They have exclusive games that can’t be found on other platforms, and they are designed to be played in the living room or at least away from a desk on a television.

PC gaming is much more diverse both in terms of what’s on offer and how and why people play. And one of its benefits is being able to buy cutting edge hardware and display games at ridiculous resolutions with graphics settings pumped to the max.

To make a long story short, this is why I don’t think that any minor differences in hardware power between the Xbox One and PS4 will matter. If there turn out to be major differences, maybe I’ll whistle a different tune.

In the meantime, consider building yourself a PC. It’s fun, not terribly expensive, and you can play some really amazing looking games at resolutions much higher than 1080p, let alone 720p. I think both next-gen consoles will have great things to offer, and both will likely be plagued with launch issues.

It’s really more about the games than about their graphics, in my humblest of opinions, even though I enjoy amazing graphics just as much as the next gamer.

I've noticed a huge shift once the PC and consoles smashed their markets together. When I was a kid, consoles were consoles: there were a lot of high-skill games, but they were simple concepts to implement. Arcades were in the same boat even though they were crushing PC and consoles in graphics for many years. But now we're at a stage where people can play both and the comparisons are obviously going to be made. It's nice to have a choice on where I get to play X game, but I'll never understand the new crop of gamer growing up thinking a console can actually compete with well made PC games except in the 3 areas the author mentioned. If anything, the constant dumbing down of mechanics and gameplay (look at what was scrapped for D3 to make a console port possible) gets even more tiring when some kid crows about how much better all around his proprietary platform is.

Someone mentioned how PC gamers are pretty pissy when it comes to consoles. I grew up on console and PC and even I'm mad. I'm mad (well, I was mad years ago, now I just bitch because I'm on the Internet) because with the shared market for both, the weakest system and it's control schemes are what's going to be optimized for. And this overemphasis on graphics makes me roll my eyes. Good graphics shouldn't even be a thing these days: AAA games should look good and have fluid animation and be expected to not brutalize the player. Maybe then developers could start writing some decent AI. But the current gen feels like slashing the tires on a Corvette so your Civic can compete with it in a race, then spending more on Toyo Tires stickers than performance upgrades.

I gave up on consoles back in the days of the SNES. My wife has a PS3 but mainly uses it for the blue-ray player it has. I went to the PC mainly because even at the time when you had 5 or more consoles competing for the same market space, PC games just seemed more plentiful, and also cheaper to build and upgrade the gaming PC.

I don't regret it. Not once has a game come out for a console that either, A) I want to play bad enough to buy a console, or B) Is not available on PC.

I always used PCs, because that's what I had growing up. My parents, quite reasonably, decided to have one powerful PC that everyone would share rather than a console here and a console there. Plus I prefer Pc games because I absolutely love RTS games and I really really hate using one of those damned gamepad joysticks to look around rather than a damn mouse.

Amusingly, most of my friends who had consoles defend them in terms of "but it's so much easier to paly with your mates." Which is true, right up until Xbox Live and PSN came along and the emphasis became sitting at home alone on the couch playing some random stranger in Korea. That and the "but I want to use my xbox because it's got my profile on it and i wont have the guns I like waah" got really boring really quickly.

I used to play consoles exclusively, but since I built a gaming PC I just barely use the 360 anymore. Don't really see any reason to get a new console.

I gave up on PCs when I moved into a flat.

The XBox is fun, simple, and doesn't take up too much room. At the same time, my MacBook is for my internet, uni and media stuff. In effect, the PC was distilled into two components which do more for me separately than one PC.

I do most of my gaming on a PC but I keep a 360 around for ace combat. That being said, when I had less resources and the specs of the Xbox were superior to my rig at the time I favored console versions of the games over pc versions. This reversed after I sunk twice the cost of a console into a new rig.

I'm not sure you can always say that a PC is cheaper, it's just that we finally plateued and there's no more pressure to get a top line graphics card or live with 20fps @800x600 ( yes, this is my recollection of the days when I had a GeForce 4200ti ) . And if you get a notebook it's even less likely to be superior to the console of the day at cost.

The next generation of consoles will give good performance-to-price vs a low-end gaming PC for two to three years. The majority of console buyers would not have $2000 to spend on a decent gaming PC, so for most buyers it isn't a realistic comparison. Also we need new consoles to move to DX11 aka properly programmable shaders and GPGPU, developing for ancient DX9 class hardware has been holding gaming back significantly. With DX11 the scope for PCs getting decent quality just by turning sliders up will be restored for another five years or so. Finally I wouldn't get that worked up about rendering at slightly sub-physical resolution; developers do it when they genuinely believe that better textures / effects is worth a very slight upscale blur (which can actually be desirable in the current gen due to primitive antialiasing). For this gen render target size will be even more varied for different rendering stages & layers, and I expect to see dynamic scaling based on scene complexity used more as well.

Also, the notion that PCs can do 4K gaming properly is premature. Until this month the only single GPU solution that could maintain 4K 60 FPS in most games was the Nvidia Titan, $1000 each; and that's at medium settings. For maximum settings you needed three cards in SLI (or two of either manufacturer's dual GPU cards). The Radeon 290X is a big step forward in high resolution support, delivering similar performance (at 4K) for $550 and requiring only dual card crossfire to get 60 FPS at high settings. I can say this from personal experience as I've been driving triple 2600 x 1600 screens with dual overclocked watercooled 7990s for a year (I have four per machine but gaming support is limited to 4 GPUs); driver support has been slowly improving but is still awful. As a result I still do most of my gaming on the 360. As of this Christmas a $2000ish PC with a 290X (or about to be launched Nvidia competitor) could be considered a minimal 4K platform... assuming you already have a 4K display, which the vast majority of people don't. 4K monitors are down to $3000 now, still not a realistic purchase for the majority of gamers.

To get decent 4K performance out of a midrange PC we need a further 2 to 3x improvement in GPU power; this will also allow high-end machines to drive 3 x 4K monitors in surround (and ultra high end 3+ GPU to drive 5). That's roughly the performance gap from the last cards of the previous litho generation (e.g. R6970 on 40nm) to the current second-gen 28nm cards, so it would be sensible to expect a similar increase from here to the second gen 20nm cards (though lots of implicit assumptions). Cheap-ass PCs with APUs ('integtrated graphics') will be able to do 1600p well and 4K badly (30 FPS medium detail) with the same technology (APUs will always be cheap ass because multi-chip solutions will always have a higher thermal budget but higher fabrication costs). So that's four to five years out for an affordable gamer PC to totally destroy consoles, i.e. do at 4K / 60 FPS what the consoles are doing at 1080p / 30 FPS. Memory for game worlds, textures etc and CPU power for physics, AI etc is also comparable on a budget gamer PC to a console at the moment, but will be convincingly superior by then.

I agree that the 'slightly less blurry graphics' selling point of the PS4 will not be a major determinant, although it will sway a few percent of 'core gamer' consumers. Awful Microsoft PR and DRM decisions probably had a bigger impact.

You don't necessarily need to spend £2000 on a decent gaming PC these days though, depending on your tastes. I got an acceptable one for £300; I sincerely doubt it'll play Medal Of Duty 4.6: Operation Dead Horse (and I have to admit it'll need another £150's worth of graphics card next year for Watch_Dogs) but it handles Kerbal Space Program, Dwarf Fortress and Wurm Online well enough.

Zaune wrote:You don't necessarily need to spend £2000 on a decent gaming PC these days though, depending on your tastes. I got an acceptable one for £300; I sincerely doubt it'll play Medal Of Duty 4.6: Operation Dead Horse (and I have to admit it'll need another £150's worth of graphics card next year for Watch_Dogs) but it handles Kerbal Space Program, Dwarf Fortress and Wurm Online well enough.

I think using indie games as a benchmark for what a gaming PC can be spec-ed at is a bit misleading in the context of a Gaming PC vs Console discussion? Any general purpose PC could handle those particular titles, I think. And it's STILL more expensive then the console base price.

...heck..even some higher end tablets, at the rate we're going.*

*I'm not sure about Kerbal - but i reckon most of the load on that game isn';t the 3D but the calcs, and that's something any modern multicore cpu has plenty off already.

The point I was trying to make is the big name big budget stuff that pushes the edge of the envelope for graphics is only one sector of the market. And not the most profitable one at that; how many copies does something low-tech but clever and innovative made by half a dozen guys in a basement office somewhere have to sell to break even?

IIRC you can get a decent PC for WoW or GW2 for about 1000€ or so sure it's more the 200(ish) € price for consoles but again IIRC console games cost more per game 40-50€ for PC and 60-70€ for consoles or something like that also I think any DLCs are free for PC but not on consoles (I could be mistaken there as I really only play WoW or GW2 on my PC).

so if you don't go for the bleeding edge on PCs you might end up saving somewhat compared to consoles.

Depends where you buy. My current machine came to a bit under €350, but it's refurbished ex-lease kit; I think it used to be a small-business server.

EDIT: And this deal didn't involve any particular net-savvy to find, I might add; I got it on eBay.

Lord Revan wrote:IIRC you can get a decent PC for WoW or GW2 for about 1000€ or so sure it's more the 200(ish) € price for consoles but again IIRC console games cost more per game 40-50€ for PC and 60-70€ for consoles or something like that also I think any DLCs are free for PC but not on consoles (I could be mistaken there as I really only play WoW or GW2 on my PC).

so if you don't go for the bleeding edge on PCs you might end up saving somewhat compared to consoles.

I don't think there are many developers who give the DLC away for free on PC. I can only name two, Valve and CD Projekt RED.

As for the price of games, how low does the price of a console game get when it goes on sale ?

Because I rarely buy a game before it hits a 75% off sale on Steam.

Depends what you buy, where you buy it and (until recently) how much you're bothered by the possibility it's been nicked.

Right now I can put together a great gaming PC for 700$ sans video card. That same PC will last a good six years provided you swap out the video card around year 3. With the Geforce 760 hitting 260$ and the AMD 290 just around the corner there are some great cards out there that will let you play anything from 2015 on back.

And yes 4k gaming is something PC can just barely do, we've had a full year lull in the video card market after the Titan launched where there was nothing performance wise launching except 10%/15% better preforming cards launching.

I built a gaming PC for $700 back in 2011, and it still runs most new titles like Shogun II or Battlefield 4 on high settings, though it can only run Metro: Last Light on medium settings.

bilateralrope wrote:I don't think there are many developers who give the DLC away for free on PC. I can only name two, Valve and CD Projekt RED.

Eugen Systems, who's made Wargame: European Escalation and Wargame: Airland Battle has released one DLC for free and is working on another.

As for the PC debate, I'll chime in to say I don't play a ton of current-gen PC games; I'm still catching up on the highlights of the last few years now that I have a decent machine. So my less-than-stellar machine (Phenom 1090T, 8gb RAM, Radeon 6870) is capable of handling whatever I throw at it just fine.

Really, so long as the motherboard you pick is capable of expansion and you buy a good CPU, swapping out the video card, and possibly adding some extra RAM, will make it competitive for a long time.

The fact that you can play an increasing variety of older games / game styles on cheap android tablets and obsolete PCs is nice for budget gamers, but not relevant to the original post. A mid 90s Nissan Micra will get you to the shops and back, but is will not excite anyone who even vaugely considers themselves an automotive enthusiast. The proposal in the OP is that a budget to mid-range new build PC is a better idea than a console, which is highly dubious.

Mr Bean wrote:Right now I can put together a great gaming PC for 700$ sans video card.

No, you can put together an 'ok' gaming PC with a midrange processor, a moderate amount of mediocre memory and a single midrange SSD; you won't get anything other than a crap low-end 1080p display inside that price either (also cheap case and/or PSU unlikely to support dual video cards). A PS4 at $400 really looks quite attractive vs that, particularly if you already have a decent 1080p TV; it comes with a good controller and (probably) a much better warranty.

$400 consoles will dominate sub $1000 gaming & media center PCs, for the purposes of (AAA and some indie) gaming and media watching, for the first few years after they come out. They always do; that's the benefit of mass production, specialised hardware and subsidising the hardware from game revenues. You currently need to spend at least $2000 on a PC + display to get something really tangibly superior, $6000 if you really want quad HD. After a few years cheap PCs will dominate again, and ultimately even smartphones will catch up (as they are to the 7th gen consoles right now). Of course that ignores strategy gamers, productivity use etc, but those factors weren't in the OP.

Starglider why do you factor in monitor price into a pc's purchase cost? Do you factor in TV cost into a console purchase cost?
If so the PC might win the value war since a 4k monitor with nice specs can be had for 370$ but an equivalent TV might cost 1400$ all on it's own.

Zaune wrote:Depends what you buy, where you buy it and (until recently) how much you're bothered by the possibility it's been nicked.

Could you put some numbers on that ?

What are the risks of buying second hand ?
How easy is it to find a specific game months or years after its release, preferably at a cheap price ?

Because when I'm talking PC, I'm talking digital distribution. Not buying second hand.

What digital distribution like on current consoles and what will it be like on next-gen consoles ?

Mr Bean wrote:Starglider why do you factor in monitor price into a pc's purchase cost? Do you factor in TV cost into a console purchase cost?
If so the PC might win the value war since a 4k monitor with nice specs can be had for 370$ but an equivalent TV might cost 1400$ all on it's own.

Because it's much more likely that a given person will already have a HDTV in the house, but will not have a monitor of similar quality for a PC?

bilateralrope wrote:Could you put some numbers on that ?

What are the risks of buying second hand ?
How easy is it to find a specific game months or years after its release, preferably at a cheap price ?

Because when I'm talking PC, I'm talking digital distribution. Not buying second hand.

What digital distribution like on current consoles and what will it be like on next-gen consoles ?

Recent numbers will have to wait until next time I'm in town but from what I recall from when I last had a console, game prices tend to drop to half the original cover price after about a year, and then half again after about another eighteen months. Some places offer trade-ins, ie chains like Game, and some independent retailers and pawn shops will buy games for cash with no questions asked. And there's always eBay or Amazon.

Can't comment on digital distribution for consoles because I haven't got one, but I bet PCs have a better range because there's fewer hoops to jump through before putting it on the market.

Starglider wrote:$400 consoles will dominate sub $1000 gaming & media center PCs, for the purposes of (AAA and some indie) gaming and media watching, for the first few years after they come out.

Minor point of correction. They'll dominate sub-$1000 PCs for graphics, which not everyone actually cares about that much; when it comes to quality of gameplay it's a mixed bag for every platform.

Forgothrax wrote:
Because it's much more likely that a given person will already have a HDTV in the house, but will not have a monitor of similar quality for a PC?

Why the sunk cost for one but not the other? There's nothing saying you can't hook up your 2000$ wall hiding HDTV up to the computer.

Look to get price specific I can get a computer with a 256 gig SSD for 170$, a power supply and case for 100$, 16 gigs of memory for 90$ a Blue-ray for 40$ That's 400$ right there without an OS or video card. Around here you can get Win 7 pro for 110$ leaving 190$ for the video card and motherboard. Well you can get a Geforce 650 for less than 100$ leaving you 90$ for a decent motherboard with the two features we left off (Networking, Sound) built in.

Moving the budget to 800$ and removing the video card lets you put together a much nicer setup but I did say 700$ and that setup all told will let you play every game on the market today. Some may be in medium but still playable.

All of which, I might add, you can use for a lot more than just gaming and watching movies.

One thing that I think is a major benefit for PC's that no one has yet mentioned is that unlike consoles a PC is not a one time all or nothing investment. Yes, you need something like $2000 for a top end gaming PC. But you can easily stretch that over several years by replacing part after part as money comes along and the situation allows it. Which is a very big thing.