Be Excellent To Each Other

Well the upfront cost is lesser, but it's more like the razors & blade model. You have to pay more for games, pay for online play, buy specific high margin accessories for extra functionality.

Unless you buy 2/3 games a year, or less, PC gaming is probably cheaper for most people contemplating a shiny new console.

Obviously there are factors beyond cost that lead to what preferences people have, and different people have different circumstances and desires, so it's great that we have so many different choices for things to play games on these days.

You'd need an optical drive anyway and Bluray capable drives are now pretty much standard and cheap as hell so that's not really going to make any difference. As for your controllers, I presume the PS4/Xbone only come with one controller in the box so for comparison purposes you'd still need to shell out cash for a second one even if you bought a console. You could argue that a PC's default control method is keyboard/mouse (i.e. you can happily play games without a controller which isn't true of the consoles) so a fair comparison wouldn't include the cost of a pad, but I think for most people a pad is a must so I don't think it's unfair to throw that cost onto the pile.



Aside from the fact AE's spent more time bumming pinball games and Borderlands 2 than anything else; what does it matter what type of games he wants to play? I can't even work out what your argument is here because it seems to be utterly circular ('if he'd only play games that didn't need any power he wouldn't need to care about power').



The fact that a £300 graphic card exists is surely nothing to do with it. Whether a PS4 stacks up as a reasonable cost depends on what it would cost you to spec a comparable PC. And while I don't know the answer to that question personally, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't require a graphics card that cost anything near £300.

When ae specifically goes on about the new consoles being significantly worse than his PC with 18 month old £300 graphics card, it's kind of relevant.

A card that cost £300 18 months ago won't cost that now so that price isn't relevant, it's the current cost you'd want to compare with surely?

I want people to stop comparing.

This probably isn't the thread for you then.

Fucking superb.

P.O.T.M.F.W.

One of the main factors that makes pc gaming more appealing and that anyone ever mentions is that you'll always need a pc anyway, so by buying a gaming machine you end up with a better typewriter all around.

Another important factor is backward compatibility. I couldn't bear the notion of losing my steam games when buying a newer machine.

oh I forgot, you had to sell your old console when buying a new one.

Some people have limited under-telly room, though.

Yes.. I don't think I could fit an 11th console under there.

I've got room for one more, I think.

It's got that bad in my room that my 3DO and NES are both on the floor. I'm thinking I need a PS2 Slim to make a little more space.

Yes, and other people have wives who care about the living room aesthetics. Besides, electronic devices don't last forever.

But some really try...

My Donkey Kong G&W is still going strong.

[edit]Holy Crap! It's worth about £40!

The vision's house?

http://www.dailyfailcenter.com/139783

I wish.. That is the stuff dreams are made of.

Mine broke down shortly after the warranty was over. Maybe I was just unlucky, or maybe i'm just careless. I lost count of how many phones i broke. Once i broke one just after one week. I was refused RMA since it was full of wet inside. I just took it to the beach on a foggy day. Stupid phones.

No boxes, though.

The GTX670 is still on sale but at daft prices for some bizarre reason in most places that still have stock, a reasonable comparison today would be the GTX760, which can be had for £178.

(Technically speaking the 760 gives up stream processors to the 670, but makes up for it with bumped core, shader, and memory speeds.)

But that's patently nonsensical since my most played game of the last five years is WoW, which runs on a toaster, and my most played game recently is Pinball Arcade, which stresses my PC so little that the graphics card's GPU doesn't even clock up past its 'sitting on the desktop doing nothing' speed.

My Steam library has titles such as The Path, FTL, Braid and Hotline Miami in it - none of which were the latest military shooters last time I checked. (Last year I played through the whole of Dungeon Keeper 2 again, bought from GOG, a game originally released in 1999.)

I do want a specced out PC to play the latest Battlefield game at my chosen settings, but it's far from the only game I play on it, and that's my prerogative anyway, surely?

I'm not even sure what your point is really, I started this thread precisely so I wasn't cluttering up the 'main' XBone/PS4 threads with this sort of babble which I know a lot of folks couldn't give two flying fucks about, but those who did want to chat around the subject could do so.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-signs-tec ... n-2013_p2/

(Also read the bit about 4K tellies.)

AE's post in the xbox one thread reminded me that I had a dig around on Ebuyer trying to spec a PC to buy instead of a console.

I lost the shopping cart so i cant show you what I stuck in it but rest assured, I enlisted the help of a complete PC fanboy!

The aim was to achieve something that will compete with a PS4 now, I understand that in a couple of years whatever I build will be surpassed by the console because of better coding and blahblahblah but thats ok because then I can just slap a better graphics card in right?

To futureproof the machine we went with a pretty decent motherboard and CPU and everything else was comparatively low spec, enough to keep up with the consoles as they are now, so not a complete power beast or anything!

We got to $ (pretend thats a pound sign, I cant find the pound sign on this keyboard... weird keyboards down here in hull...) $650 and didnt have a power supply or a physical drive. so I really dont think its possible to compete with the consoles at a similar price point so I think my mind is made up now, PS4 it is. when I can find one. and when I break under the peer pressure.

Well here's a pre-built system for £420 that's pretty much an XBoner/PS4 equivalent just using the APU's graphics, chuck a £130 graphics card in there and you're well over the top.

http://www.ebuyer.com/517546-pc-special ... cs-d563907

Comes with Win 8.1 installed, 1TB storage, 8GB RAM.

The other thing you have to remember with a PC is how incredibly cheap games are, and also how versatile they are.

The logic is of course that pretty much everyone needs a computer anyway, so why not spent a bit more on it and get one that can do games as well?

Certainly with the £650 you've already managed to use on your spec you could build a pretty tasty gaming PC.

*but* you also have to look at whats missing in that example - just from a very quick look

Bluray drive
Any input device (DS4's and Xbox one controllers are £50 - even saying you just go for 'similar' but I think its reasonable to budget another £50 for a keyboard / mouse and wired controller)
Wireless network card

Add all of those on and thats another £120 or so ?

I'm pretty sure with self sourced parts you can get a PC 'close' to a next gen console for a similar amount of money but there is a world of difference between the two and the experience you'll have with either.

Especially if you get the from the right "shops".

Why not go for an Xbox One Laptop?

http://www.slashgear.com/xbox-one-lapto ... -25310008/

because Microsoft

Oh for sure, you're never going to put together a competent gaming PC for the same cost as that of a console, but I'd argue that the PS4/XBoner generation is probably the closest that the two have ever been. (For an awfully long time £1000 was basically your starting point for a gaming PC, even more than that if you go back into the 90s (I remember paying £2000 for a gaming PC in 1997 or 1998), and still £1000 at 360/PS3 launch.)

Once you factor in the ridiculously cheap games on PC (and I'm not talking about 'Grim...'s special deals' either), any keen gamer is almost certainly going to find it the cheaper experience over the course of a couple of years.

Q) Which is the best media player out of the PS4 and XBone?

A) The PS3.


The PS4 is the better of the two, the XBone is pretty awful, apparently.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... dia-player

I take it you have never actually programmed on a console dev kit?
If you had, or had any clue about the commercial realities of making games, you wouldn't spout this kind of utter drivel.

Consoles are fixed hardware. Now to an ignorant layman, that's 'so what', but to a graphics coder, it is the difference between a real racing car and a pimped out road car with nitrous, spoilers, fat exhaust and all the rest of it. There are things you can do on a fixed hardware platform that have nothing to do with benchmarks or other guff that mean consoles can push effects & techniques that are flat out impossible to do on a PC in any commercially meaningful way (i.e. outside of tech demos), simply because you know exactly how the hardware behaves. PC games have to cope with random performance of each part and the core game has to work on the min-spec. Shiny features are often added at the behest (and if you are lucky, expense) of graphics card manufacturers - but the bottom line is they cannot be critical in any way to the game as some players will never see them. This also causes any new shinies to be considerably more work intensive for PC games than consoles, hence limiting the number of effects that can be considered.

Not that any of this matters, as shinies do not a great game make.

<grabs popcorn>

Isn't DirectX meant to tie down a lot of that stuff?

It provides a common API, nothing more.

Unless it:s changed radically recently.

And you can assume that within that API things are going to work, right?

DirectX simplifies the interface to disparate hardware, but doesn't change the fact that if the card does not support multiple floating point render buffers, you aren't going to be able to render to multiple float render buffers, aka deferred rendering. So you need fallbacks. And the game has to be playable when using the fallbacks. And fallbacks cost time to implement & test.

The main aspect comes to framerates. On a console, if it runs 30Hz* on the test kits, it will run 30Hz on every production console out there, so you can pack in as much stuff as you can to that limit. The sweet spot is usually about 2-3 years after launch, when you get games (often from Japan) that are entirely console-focussed, and so don't have to pander to any lower specs, while the min-spec PC level is still under what a well-written console engine can push out.

*Yes, I said 30Hz. You get to push far more shinies and still have the game perfectly playable at 30Hz for all but the most twitchy of action games. The only people who care are PC fanboys who seem to think that FPS is the ultimate arbiter of penis size.

Damn. Burn

The only people that don't, of course, are coders who can't get their game above 15FPS

Both a bike and a train work at the task of going forward, doesn:t mean you:d want to use the bike for your daily commute.

This is just wrong. I am currently playing Rallisport Challenge 2 on the original Xbox, and the super smooth 60fps makes all the difference in the world to something like Sega Rally on Xbox 360. F-Zero Gx would not be the same game without 60 fps.

And the Dreamcast has a great selection of games that run at 60fps and feel proper 'arcade quality' for it. It's one of the reasons I love it, and why I just don't have the same respect for the Xbox 360/PS3 generation. I no longer feel like a am getting that quality delivered on my consoles that I was used to.

I don't care much for the shinies, but 60fps make a huge difference to me. The fact that game developers no longer care (except possibly Nintendo) is one of the reasons I will probably abandon console gaming and go PC.

As I have mentioned before, I very much regret the push for "MOAR PIXLS!", when "more stuff" would have been far better to look at.

Pretty well everything I've played on the PS4 so far seems to have more of both

Yes, but that makes it an abstraction layer, which by its very definition pretty much prohibits getting maximum possible performance out of the underlying kit.

Oh sure, but imagine what the PS4 could do if it only had to run at 480p.

480p is just too low on modern TVs, it was fine with cathode ray.
720p though, I'm happy with that.

I didn't even know (care?) GTA5 was running at 720p until the mini guide popped up.