PC Gaming and the problem with parity.

I game at 4K. You don’t even need the latest or greatest hardware for it apart from GPU. My PC apart from the GPU is over 5 years old now. I can play over 95% of my steam library 60fps or more with a 980Ti I picked up recently for £190 from members market. I can also play 100% of my games above 30fps with it. When at 4K, the GPU becomes the bottleneck.

The above is even without tweaking settings. Turning off a bunch of useless effects like depth of field, motion blur etc and even lowering from ultra to high in many cases gets you a lot of fps. At least it is proper 4K, unlike the consoles. Only advantage I see consoles having over PC is HDR and access to proper OLED TVs to display it. Not to fussed about that yet as I think HDR has not matured enough yet, just look at Mass Effect Andromeda. Maybe it will get there in a couple of years time with the PlayStation 5 or something.

The sweet spot imo is PC and a Nintendo Switch. Then occasionally borrow a friends PS4 for the odd exclusive and that’s it.

What I also love about the PC is having all my game library in one place and easily accessible. Fancy playing some Deus Ex? No problem, can download it in minutes with a mod and play it. Could not do that on a console.
 
NZXT30 said:
You are throwing me a couple of exclusives so no comparison can be made. Find a good multiplat, check resolution, fps and settings that its running on ps4 (eurogamer and df provide that) and you'll see how easy it is to run on a pc gpu with the same tflops. I'm not going to do the work for you.
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That's the point he's making, that exclusive titles tend to be tailored quite specifically to the hardware they're running on at every point during the game's development.
 
I'm not going to get into the PC vs Console debate as it's endless.

However, to play devils advocate - The consoles being the primary target for game dev also means that PC Gamers hardware lasts significantly longer throughout title releases. Whilst shiny new graphics are great I think we are at a peak right now, only some SERIOUS horsepower advancement will result in a significantly better graphical experience. Things like HDR, Raytracing etc. I would rather gameplay, replay-ability and actual game related stuff were developed rather than just derping on graphics all the time.
 
PC is dead once VR on the consoles is at the the 4k level with a decent frame rate.

PS6 i would imagine, so given Sony`s promise of a quicker release for next gen product 6-8 years away.
 
SPG said:
PC is dead once VR on the consoles is at the the 4k level with a decent frame rate.

PS6 i would imagine, so given Sony`s promise of a quicker release for next gen product 6-8 years away.
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Trouble is, by then people on PC will either be on 8K or 4K 144Hz by then, probably even on ray tracing. They will likely never be able to close the gap using the same hardware used on PC due to the cost of the console and size. Unless people start accepting bigger more expensive consoles. Even then there will still be a market for the PC as porting to PC in most cases is not hard these days as the hardware used is the same, unlike before when something like the PS2 which had something completely custom.

I cannot see PC gaming dying to be honest. It may get smaller and more niche, but competently die? Highly unlikely.
 
TheVoice said:
That's the point he's making, that exclusive titles tend to be tailored quite specifically to the hardware they're running on at every point during the game's development.
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It goes both ways. A well optimised pc exclusive could match console exclusives with similar hardware.

SPG said:
PC is dead once VR on the consoles is at the the 4k level with a decent frame rate.
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SPG said:
PS6 i would imagine, so given Sony`s promise of a quicker release for next gen product 6-8 years away.
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Yeah that's why its constantly growing with steam being bigger than xbox live or psn. Youtube and Twitchtv are also dominated by pc gaming, even the OCUK console forum is dying. Basically these days if your game is not on PC its kind of irrelevant. Consoles are in decline because people start to realise they are proprietary hardware with no other use. Usually proprietary hardware are better at what they specialize yet consoles are far worse :D

PS6 if it comes out is most likely the last playstation.​
 
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NZXT30 said:
It goes both ways. A well optimised pc exclusive could match console exclusives with similar hardware.


Yeah that's why its constantly growing with steam being bigger than xbox live or psn. Youtube and Twitchtv are also dominated by pc gaming, even the OCUK console forum is dying. Basically these days if your game is not on PC its kind of irrelevant. Consoles are in decline because people start to realise they are proprietary hardware with no other use. Usually proprietary hardware are better at what they specialize yet consoles are far worse :D

PS6 if it comes out is most likely the last playstation.​
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Only time will tell, The PC will still be around of course, music editing, Photoshop etc. BUT gaming wise it will be a even more niche with even more expense attached to it. 8K no point really, unless it's VR

VR is going to change the game once it hits the masses with that killer tittle.
 
Rock_n_Roll said:
Aye, PC has the frame rate advantage just now.

Next gen consoles will be HDMI 2.1 out the box and have features like Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), Freesync 2. Every console game could finally have consistent high frames rates (if implemented and you have a compatible TV). There goes another advantage PC once had, gone.

There is just no point buying high-end parts now for gaming, especially with the price hikes, as the return is very little.
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Sure the next console is going to do UHD, 60 fps at all times with no drops. It's going to do all this for the £400 that all launch consoles cost? Keyboard and mouse with no fees for online gaming, with better graphical settings and higher framerates, with a view to do video editing and many other tasks, I'm surprised many of you are on a PC hardware site, surely you'd be better off on something that is more inclined toward consoles?

Consoles have their place but will never be better than a PC hardware wise, this keeps getting bought up every year for the last 30 years and it's always had the same result.
 
On the cost front, it feels a bit different for me than just £1500 or so for a gaming PC vs £350 for a console.

I need a PC capable of performing well at a few things that mean I want a fairly snappy system anyway (SPSS/STATA, some transcoding, some video editing, apart from constant use of Excel and other Office apps).

I think the only things I have that are a concession to gaming over what I'd otherwise have wanted are a 980Ti (which I got second-hand for £250) and a G-Sync monitor (think it was around £320).

That's around £350-400ish more than I'd have spent on it if I hadn't been thinking about games, which is not that far off from a console cost (also it has the benefit of not having to fight for the living room TV if I wanted to play anything! Not that I'm currently gaming, but still... :)).

I think most people need a PC of some sort, don't they? Or am I hopelessly out of date in thinking that? So the real cost difference is just the extra/higher-end components and peripherals that allow gaming versus a PC to suit whatever other needs people have (ok, for 90%+ this is only web-browsing, video playing and word processing, but still, it's not zero-cost).

For me, over the years I've been gaming, vying with my wife for use of the TV would have been a no-go! That means I'd have needed a console alongside my PC in my office, so I'd have wanted a gaming monitor anyway - which would make the cost difference even less. It seems getting a console would have been more expensive for me that making the PC I'm using anyway gaming-capable.

Am I such an outlier on this?
 
the problem is energy, consoles are built to much lower power draw and heat output requirements than your average gaming rig. and the simple fact is for a given technology level you're not going to be squeezing any more performance per watt out of a console than a pc.

so unless we start seeing that extra horsepower being under-utilised on pc by poorly optimised games, or consoles upping their power consumption then pc is still always going to have the edge.
 
Doogles said:
Sure the next console is going to do UHD, 60 fps at all times with no drops. It's going to do all this for the £400 that all launch consoles cost? Keyboard and mouse with no fees for online gaming, with better graphical settings and higher framerates, with a view to do video editing and many other tasks, I'm surprised many of you are on a PC hardware site, surely you'd be better off on something that is more inclined toward consoles?

Consoles have their place but will never be better than a PC hardware wise, this keeps getting bought up every year for the last 30 years and it's always had the same result.
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I never said or stated consoles were better hardware wise (I don't own any consoles by the way). I'm merely pointing out the fact that console parity is making high-end hardware redundant for a lot of us due to devs/publishers not taking advantage of the hardware.

You're spending all this money on high performance hardware and the publishers/devs aren't taking advantage of it. They are targeting the least powerful systems, so that everything runs optimally across the board.

It's just souped up console ports at this point.

PC gamers spend all this money on hardware just to get versions of games that don't look that much better than the console versions. With many being broken even at release.

The days of PC games looking far superior is over. Accept it.
 
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Rock_n_Roll said:
The days of PC games looking far superior is over. Accept it.
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The difference will always get smaller as the technology gets easier to produce. The justification will always be personally subjective to spend more money.

I would say that PC Enthusiasts will buy high end gear regardless however. Because they're enthusiasts. A ****** analogy would be say any car with a 2.0L engine or up. Why buy something that can get up to 160 miles per hour when the speed limit is 70? Simple answer I like cars and it's a smoother ride.

I don't think you can argue "Consoles" will ever replace PC's in fact I imagine by the time we get close to that eventuality Consoles will simply BE PCs. We're already seeing PC's accessible as consoles after all (Steambox etc).
 
Rock_n_Roll said:
The days of PC games looking far superior is over. Accept it.
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It does not need to be far superior. It will always be superior due to factors mentioned already and always have a market. PC gaming is going nowhere anytime soon. Accept it.
 
Rock_n_Roll said:
Aye, the platform is going nowhere with regards to influencing AAA devs/publishers to push high-end PC hardware. Accept it.
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And why would they do that? The most popular pc games are never the most hardware demanding. PC gaming has always been about modding, community, flexibility and custom hardware.

What you think games like uncharted or horizons have any sort of merit in the gaming world? These games are forgotten one month after their release. Meanwhile millions are anticipating the Dota 2 International next month. People saying that pc gaming is a niche couldn't be more wrong.
 
PC gaming will never die. Future consoles will become more PC like and it will become easier to port stuff across.

What might die out or diminish are developers putting much, if any work in to making the PC version any different to the console version in the future.

PC should still be doing well in other markets too - indie, RTS, extreme modding, MMORPG, competitive FPS.
 
Once you play on gsync/freesync at high frame rate, consoles become somewhat unplayable. Current gen is years old now and they drive the market. The recent console releases have done nothing but up the resolution. There will be a jump in quality upon the next releases as usual.
 
If/when a console has DCS ported to it, it can handle the requirements of a highly complex flight sim, allows connection of my control system and output in VR, then maybe.
 
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