Never really had stability problems with my PC, I have fried my mobo though when I bumped a capacitor with a ring I forgot to take off.
Are PCs still really less reliable than consoles?
- Thread starter Dr Spaceman
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Absolutely agree. My PC is far more stable than my Xbox, although my PS3 has yet to give me any problems at all other than a severe lack of games.Jaythulhu said:
The thing is though, the developers seem to be considerably less professional when it comes to the quality assurance of PC games as opposed to console games. The reasons are fairly obvious - almost all PCs have internet access and they all have hard drives. Consoles (up until very recently) have generally had neither, so they had to get it right first time. Now that consoles have hard drives and internet they are starting to pull the same shit there - release games half done and then try to sort it all out later.
That is just not good enough.
However, even with consoles starting to fall into the "release it now, patch it later" trap they are still of vastly higher quality than there PC counterparts. Why? Because it is almost institutionalized in the PC gaming industry now. Bugs, major game-breaking bugs, are not only tolerated but actually expected and excused by the consumers. Well... some of the consumers. If you look at how the sales are going you will see a lot of gamers are switching to console.
People will ***** and moan when they spend 5 dollars on a movie that was crap. When you spend 30 dollars or more on a PC game, take it home and find it doesn't even work and that they knew that before they sold it too you, that is some serious customer dissatisfaction, and it's starting to bite the industry on that ass hard now.
I've had stability problems with my PC and none with my 360 (I was lucky)
But I still prefer my pc and find it more stable in a way, see if I fry my pc, due to overclocking or other assorted stuff, I can always fix it myself in under an hour usauly.
Off topic bit, is GTA IV that intense on a PC?
Cause its not a pretty game
Is it just a bad port?
But I still prefer my pc and find it more stable in a way, see if I fry my pc, due to overclocking or other assorted stuff, I can always fix it myself in under an hour usauly.
Off topic bit, is GTA IV that intense on a PC?
Cause its not a pretty game
Is it just a bad port?
100% with ya there. Didn't used to be the case, but the advent of the xbox/ps2 really meant developers could knock out a game much quicker, and with a greater profit margin, then just crap it over to pc later (which usually failed, but ubisoft still try it with each of their releases). Hopefully soon the gamer community will do something to force the developers and publishers to get their act together.cuddly_tomato said:
The only thing I can really think of is a world-wide boycott of some allegedly A-grade title. I doubt it will happen though. Too many kids using pester-power on their irresponsible parents
From what I've read (I don't own the game, my PC doesn't have a snowflakes' chance in hell of running it smoothly) it has some really bad bottlenecking issues, offloading far to much to CPU rather than the much faster GPU. The settings menu "memory usage" feature is horribly inaccurate, forcing you to use lower settings while potentially you could handle considerably higher ones with little to no performance loss. Add that they disabled the smart texture scaling the console version had. (massive performance boost, no need to load super-high res textures for far away stuff) And all I can say is, lousy quality port. Controls seem a bit odd too, only supporting the Xbox 360 controller or mouse/keyboard (although they are apparently fixing that in a patch)Bluntknife said:
RRoD notwithstanding, of course.Fatalis67 said:
I think the single greatest benefit to a PC's reliability compared to a console is you can actually service your own PC. You can swap out any damaged part of your PC with a working part and that's that.
With consoles, should one ever break on you, you have to send it in for repairs. Even if you had a clear understanding of how the console is pieced together there are very few user-serviceable parts.
Wow I count that as a garbage port, but I am seeing a bit of a pattern.Azhrarn-101 said:
It seems as though when a console game eventualy gets ported to PC they try to make it as hardware intensive as possible (without much of a graphics upgrade)
Possibly as a way of saying "consoles are more powerful than PC's" but maybe I'm reading too much into this.
Get off the high horse. I was polite, so I can't imagine why you're being so caustic. I don't recall blaming you for my PC troubles. And I read your full post and I answered it in full. You failed to understand my point and became angry.corroded said:
I absolutely can blame the reliability of the machine for problems caused by user error. We're getting into semantics here, but in every field, ease of use contributes to a reputation for reliability. That was the purpose of my Kalashnikov example. A product that requires more knowledge to operate without error is necessarily less reliable than a product that requires less. Then there's the issue of maintenance: again, a machine that requires maintenance is necessarily less reliable than one that doesn't.
Please keep in mind that we are both using facts (of sorts) to enhance our respective opinions. I feel like you're approaching this from the perspective that one of us must be "right" and the other "wrong." Sounds to me like we just disagree on the definition of "reliable."
And calm down.
I've decided that consoles are problematic for one main reason; they do inevitably go wrong, especially recently with more technical consoles, and when they do you can't fix it.
That's the crunch point for me; I'd rather have a PC that goes down every 6 weeks and takes 30 minutes to repair each time, than a console that dies once a year and costs me to sort it..
That's the crunch point for me; I'd rather have a PC that goes down every 6 weeks and takes 30 minutes to repair each time, than a console that dies once a year and costs me to sort it..
Erm.. I don't mean to be a dick, but most of you either have no idea what you're talking about, or just can't part with your PC at all. I have a PC myself obviously, but I don't use it for gaming anymore. PC's may not crash all that much, but there's just so many hassles especially with high end gaming. You constantly have to shell out a good bit of money for upgrades, have to mess with settings, installs, and a number of other little annoyances. Sure, it's not that bad really but it's still easier to just play on a console.
P.S. My 360 hasn't died yet, and I've had it for two years.
P.S. My 360 hasn't died yet, and I've had it for two years.
I saw GT4 on the PS3, and it showed slow downs when the action started rolling, as did it's predecessors. The thing about consoles is that once that happens, that's it, the game is *known* for that, and all future copies for that system will have the same probable. Hell, Grandia for the PS still has the same problems. For the computer, if you get slow downs, you have options, turn off anti-aliasing, drop the resolution, or just update your hardware, knowing it will also solve the problem for whatever other game you want to buy in that generation. More expensive, but more options.
When they do go wrong you have the option to simply buy a new one. An Xbox360 now costs as much as a mid range graphics card alone (at least UK prices).Aurora219 said:
My PC now can do everything I need it to do. It is adequately upgraded to play the X series of games and thus I will not bother spending any more money on it. The entire rat-race of upgrades is frankly retarded. Consoles are constant, and are future proof for at least 5 years. My 8800GTS graphics card was top class when I got it waaaaay back in the summer of 2007, now it is obselete. If I want to use it to play the latest PC games I must upgrade again. I purchased my first Xbox back in 2006 and it is still cutting edge and likely will be until at least 2010.
This is the other problem with PC games (after them being criminally bugged) - they tend to only run properly on the best hardware available when they are released. This is a retarded dick move by the game companies as this wipes out about 90% of your target market.
I have had one die and one get the DVD draw stuck and I still prefer it to PC gaming in its current form.Aidoc said:
PCs don't really crash that much, unless you do something silly. However, there are more small errors. The thing is, when you get an error with your pc, you don't need to send it in to be replaced by Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, or whatever store you bought it from. You can fix 99.9% of PC problems yourself with google and a bit of knowledge.
Also, If you're "constantly shelling out a good bit of money" to keep up to date in PC gaming, you're doing something wrong. It really doesn't cost that much, the need to upgrade constanly is a myth. For example, if you buy a new game for PC, you can run it at the settings equivalent to a console, and not need to upgrade for ages. If you feel the need to play everything on max every year, then yes, you need to upgrade. However consoles do not play games on max settings this far into their lifespan. Unless the max settings are designed around consoles, in which case, my argument still applies, because you wouldn't need to upgrade your pc. The only times there are issues with games like that are times when there is very shitty optimization, which is not that common.Aidoc said: