Subjective Gaming Experience Playing On Budget £300 PC or Super High End £3000 PC. Does It Make Much

LEE929394

LEE929394

LEE929394

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Hello,
Hope it's ok linking to this site but thought this was interesting, the title to my post is this article in a nut-shell.

http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/pc/can-a-300-gaming-pc-compare-to-a-3000-one-1071338

Not that i totally agree with the author as i don't know what the exact conditions of this 'scientific' experiment were but i'm intrigued by the fact that he got a bunch of people, a few experienced gamers/hardware type guys and some normal people for a better control/comparison.

If you don't want to read through to the end; the result is most people could not tell the difference when gaming between the ultra high end 6 core i7 rig worth £3000 and a very budget £300 rig that isn't much more powerful then my current Q6600/ATI 5850 set up that i'm hoping to upgrade soon.
(and still will upgrade regardless of reading this article lol!)

They factored in the frame rates so both would be running decent FPS so this wouldn't affect the result.

Like i said before, i DO find this very hard to digest but maybe, just maybe, we spend all our hard earned cash on new fancy PC hardware every few years to beat our last load of hardware's benchmark results in our benchmarking software of choice; BUT! maybe this huge performance gain does not compare so well in a real world setting?


Can you get away with dialing down a few gfx settings, AA and AF on older rigs, turn down to medium and still have the full gaming experience without noticing too much?
Sure depends on the game, maybe ultra and high have less perceived difference compared to high to medium.

My own experience recently was NFS Most Wanted 2012. Game ran like a dog on my system until i turned down a lot of settings to medium, SSAO, reflections, shadows etc etc. Hardly noticed the difference after a while, the FPS boost was the biggest advantage and this seems overall more important than anything else imo.
Some compromise over frame rate and image quality is needed.

So is it purely subjective and do some people notice quality/detail settings influence on the gaming experience gfx wise more than others?

And at the end of the day does your brain filter things out pretty quickly so it doesn't matter after a while when the settings are turned down?
 
i couldnt cope with a lower end system if i could afford a higher end one, because id always be thinking i could have better, dunno itd frustrate me in that sense. Which is why i cant play consoles now i have a good pc,but some people dont care/play both so its just preference.
 
I'm a quality freak, I need to game at the utmost graphics and utmost smoothness. If I can't get that smoothness, then yeah I'll disable SSAO or something until I hit that 90fps+ for ultra smooth 120hz goodness ! Anything below 90 and I feel the lag when playing. :)

PC gaming has destroyed Xbox360s for me, and also my friends who have played on my computer and had to go home to their Xbox's hahaha !
 
buy a xbox360 and see the difference of low end stuff like far cry 3

then turn on the £3000 one and see your mouth drop

a poor or rubbish game / port can be just as bad on any system, but some games need to be played at max, i love total war, and massive battles, low end systems just can't do it justice, or one thats programmed poorly also doesn't matter on what system you play them on, some run slow no matter what you spec.

flight sim's are the same and many now fps and rpg need good spec pc to play and max / ultra settings.
 
i dont mind to much, i prefer high textures to AA if i had to choose but atm my system can cope with both.

i know some people hate ssao but i love it, just seems to add depth to me especially in the witcher 2, the secret world also does WoW a bit of justice too.

i think i could easily game on any rig as long as i could in native res with a bit of eye candy ;)
 
A decent £1,000 PC will run anything above 30fps, I don't see the point of a £3,000 one? :confused:

£300 though... can you even play a modern game on one of those? :confused:
 
illuz said:
PC gaming has destroyed Xbox360s for me, and also my friends who have played on my computer and had to go home to their Xbox's hahaha !
Click to expand...

Think this has to do with the Xbox360 being so desperately desperately old (over 8 years!) , the quality difference is very obvious here, especially since they physically can't hold a decent frame rate at anywhere near HD resolutions. Lighting and textures so limited by todays standard, amazing what developers can do on the xbox considering the age of the hardware.

This article's low end £300 rig is more like an Xbox if it came out in 2010 rather than 2005, i don't know if the difference between high and low end would be so noticeable after a while.

I mean textures and stuff, all the high resolution textures look so pretty when you're actually looking out for them, makes less of an impact when you're actually gaming, maybe more on a sub-conscious level when you're in the action.

'Change blindness' phenomenon is well documented in scientific studies.
If you applied a similar experiment and switched from maxed out ultra settings to high mid-game would you notice the difference if you weren't looking out for it?
The thing that definitely would be noticed IMO is if you switched the frame rate, 60fps to 45fps is noticeable, 45fps to 30fps much more so.
 
OK first up their £3000 system is shockingly poor, nay atrocious as a gaming system for the money. They've spunked a huge wad of cash on the Revodrive and an ultra high end cpu, and then paired it with a single 7970. The absolute bare minimum I'd expect in a £3k gaming rig would be 7970 crossfire or NV equivalent and you could probably even get that from a prebuilt system. Seriously, who spends 3 grand on a gaming rig and gets a single 7970 - heck what gaming system has a hard drive costing 3x the gpu?

For me, a high end rig isn't about maxing out all the settings and getting an average framerate in any case. It is about running with a high framerate, generally at good settings perhaps with a few of the more demanding ones lowered slightly if required.

Essentially what they seem to have done is:
-High end rig, max everything out to cripple performance a bit (amazing graphics with average performance) and not really take advantage of the capability to run with great graphics and amazing performance.
-Low end rig, lower settings down to give decent graphics with mediocre to average performance)
-Monitor no doubt run at 60hz to further limit the ability of the high end system to stretch its legs

To something like me, the difference would probably be more pronounced if they actually optimised the settings on the high end rig rather than just maxing everything out and getting very little visual gain for the framerate hit, plus running at 120hz+ of course (not clear from article)..

Of course the above is kinda missing the point so I'll try to tackle the topic at hand without worrying about how they spent their money. Essentially we all know you get diminishing returns; if you spend £1324 on a HD you are NOT going to find it 10x as good for gaming as a £132.40 HD. Likewise, if you get a bunch of random people in to test the different systems, some probably won't notice much of a difference. But that is kind of a moot point, because these casual gamers who think 30fps is OK are never going to spend £3000 on a gaming rig anyway.
 
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PC gaming is a long way ahead of consoles. Play a PC game @ 1080P with max everything its not just the visual quality its such a long way ahead the FPS & zero screen tearing or zero dropped frames makes a huge difference. Throw in no input lag & SSD loading times for good measure ;)

Anyone who cannot see this is either not looking close enough or half blind :rolleyes:

Decent gaming PC's (which can easily be self built for sub £700) are so far ahead its only the lack of games which use DX11 & more than 512Mb VRam which makes the consoles look better than they are I mean they could never ever handle 720P with decent detail levels & most companies stopped trying to inovate 3-4 years ago its been UT3 based games almost ever since with few notable exceptions :(

Nextgen consoles will just be capable of what the PC could produce 2-3 years ago DX11 quality with smooth FPS & no screen tearing you could argue that current consoles are not even capable of offering a HD gaming experience when so many console games run sub 720P & have to frame double the buffers or perform some other technical trick to even run @ 15-20FPS :rolleyes:
 
Most people don't have a clue and play on integrated hd4000 or lower...!

I like at least high detail in 1080p. As long as I'm no more than 2 generations or so behind I can play the latest stuff well. Ssd makes a huge dufference to useability. But most people wont even know what it is. My gtx 460 is now in need of replacement but I can last it out until something like ti 660 cones more affordable.
 
Yeah, a bit of a disappointing high end system, better than mine in many ways, but my 7950 Crossfire overclocked would give much better results (Outliers excluded).
 
All depends on the user imo, average Joe would properly be more than impressed with with £300 system. Most of the people who read these forums are obviously here for a reason and would notice the difference between low and high end. With regards to price difference, most would probably think we're all mad spending what we do.
 
The medium and high options are so close in terms of graphic quality usually, 90% of the time you wouldn't notice it anyway, unless you sit there admiring the surroundings that is, and for most games you wouldn't, maybe something like Crysis. In a game like BF3, how often are you going to be admiring the scenery, compared to shooting at something? Not much, and medium - high settings are so close, unless you look out for the shadows or insignificant details, you wouldn't notice the difference anyway.

It's mainly e-peen, really, I build for medium-high settings with 60FPS, I don't need all the bells and whistles, because I don't notice it most of the time when there's a lot of action anyway. I'd always build around 1k, which is a decent set-up, can play modern games and most future games medium-high for the next few years, no need to spend 3k on something which will be outdated in 6 months.
 
I'd say for something like BF3 there is a correlation between how well you play and how good your computer is. Even upgrading from 2500k and 8GB of RAM to 2700k and 16GB has made me even better. Shame Virgin Media has gone down hill ping wise in the past week and a half.

If I wasn't into BF3 and other demanding games I'd be happy with a £300 pc that can run Minecraft, Kerbal, farming sim.
 
The Running Man said:
Most people don't have a clue and play on integrated hd4000 or lower...!.
Click to expand...

Yeah this is kinda what I'm getting at in terms of how balanced their two systems are:

High end: GPU costs 15% of budget
Low end: GPU costs over 20% of budget.

Topic / article title is a bit misleading in relation to the article as the '£300' system actually costs over £500 when you add up all the components. 67% over budget, so not even remotely close. Surely to be fair the £3000 system should actually cost £5000? They only spent £3098 on it if my quick totting up was accurate.
In fact no matter how well-intentioned that article was they've really let themselves down on the execution.
 
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Nice article, albeit I admit I didnt read it all.

I think the crux of the matter as far as PC gaming goes, is to get a nice balance between peformance and price, becuase technology moves so fast, you will still find if you do spend £3k on a system that you probably will upgrade just as soon as if you had spent £700.

Just as an example, lets say you by a GTX690, versus someone that bought a 7950. Huge difference in price, both (depending on res) getting equal enjoyment out of the cards, and 2 years later Dx12 comes around. The 7950 owner can justify 'splurging' another £250 on a new DX12 capable card, whilst the GTX690 owner, is what gona splurge another £700 and probably another £1000 on mobo and cpu, whilst the other dude, does a mid level mobo and cpu upgrade to stay current and max the potential of his gpu.

Spen medium, upgrade often, spend big, upgrade rarely. The first will stay uptodat, the later will be behind the pace.
 
meh, as said its all subjective. I play a game to enjoy the story and have fun, some people play games and spend days modding them just to make them look pretty.

I've just upgraded from a amd 64 4400+ x2, 2gb ram + 2 x 8800gt's to an i7, 8gb ram and dropped to a single 8800gt.

It's allowed me to play games that my old system started to struggle with like Black Op's 2, but I don't spend hours tweaking games. I set the graphics res as high as possible, turn on average-ish settings and just enjoy / or not enjoy the game :D Must have x FPS etc....life's too short.

My AMD system was originally built with a top of the range 7800gtx, and that has to be 6-7 years ago, cost me around £1500 at the time so I think I had my money's worth :)
 
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I don't play games to look at nice scenery, I can go outside to see highest scenery.
Game play is all important. Very old graphics do subtract, but there's zero need to great graphics and even when I've had a decent system, certain games I just could not get on with high detail settings.
 
I gave up the battle to have a high end rig long ago; the law of diminishing returns has never been more evident than it is with PC hardware. I'm still on a Q6700 and 5850 and have seen no need to upgrade at all, everything runs just fine.
 
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