Akalabeth said:
In both cases, the person playing the game is not getting the "best graphics" yet in one case you attack the console for it and in the other case you laud the PC. One cannot have it both ways. Unless you were specifically speaking of blu ray movies, which, I don't believe you were but I could be mistaken.
You seem to be under the impression that there are only 2 Graphical options: Console, and "Best".
This is not how it works.
No, the PC may not play on the best graphical options, however as pointed out before, even on the lowest options it will gain a boost compared to the console in that department. Playing on Medium settings will mean more shader effects, generally a higher resolution, greater FPS, higher resolution textures, more detailed models and more compared with the console version. Its not the best it can be, but it is better than what a console can offer.
As I pointed out in another post, its almost a double standard with many console players, who will criticize the Wii and WiiU for its lack of power, despite consoles themselves being significantly less powerful that a PC. There are points in between Console grade and Maximum settings graphics.
zelda2fanboy said:
No fancy sound card doodad
Actually, your console will have a sound card. You just won't call it as such. To you its just part of a console, just like externally the Sound card appears as part of the PC as a whole. Its just the name of the part that you actually plug the optical cable into.
no crazy "optical cable" that you keep going on about.
Again, a technical name. You did say you plugged the sound into your console yes? Then you plugged in an optical cable.
sumanoskae said:
A console will never cost you $1200 and need a $200 update every six months before promptly becoming entirely obsolete and requiring another $1000.
Neither does any PC made for any reason other than as a hobby. PC gaming will cost you $300 or so to start up, assuming you already have a PC, and you will need to spend $200 on an upgrade every 7-10 years.
You almost always know that a game will fucking WORK when you buy it on a console.
Same for PC. And better yet, on the PC if it doesn't work, you can download a mod or fanmade patch to make it work, as opposed to hoping the devs get around to it on a console.
You don't have to do extensive research on every fucking piece of your console to ensure that it does what it fucking says it does.
Extent of research that needs to be done for a PC:
GPU: None.
RAM: None.
CPU: Check chipset or W/E, its generally labelled as "Compatible with [AM3] Motherboards"
Mobo: Check chipset or W/E, its generally labelled as "Compatible with [AM3] CPUs"
Everything else: None.
If you get into dual card rigs with large numbers of harddrives and fans you may then need to look into Power supply and usage, but as a general rule 720W, or even 500W, will sustain pretty much any rig.
You don't have to worry about your console catching a virus.
But you do have to worry about PSN or XBL being hacked.
When a console breaks you can just grab the memory unit (On the 360, at least) and plug it into a new one, if a PC dies you have to painstakingly backup and reinstall all your games, and even then you sometimes lose progress.
Umm.
What?
When my PC has a hardware failure and I need new parts, or more accurately my friend's PCs as I've never personally had the problem, I unplug the SSDs/HDDs and plug them into the new rig. Everything is exactly as it was, no changes. No reinstall needed. Nothing, zip, nada.
Games are less buggy in general on consoles.
Uhhh.
Not entirely sure I agree.
It will all come down to personal experience, but I don't run into bugs on my PC unless its with Bethesda games, and then there's generally fan made patches to download that fix them. Meanwhile consoles had Dragons flying backwards, and unplayable lag whilst Bethesda tried to fix said issues.[/quote]
sumanoskae said:
So your PC cost you how much up front? I'm honestly curios as to what you paid for a machine that can run "Nearly anything on high settings"
How much did you Console+TV cost you up front?
Just like most people have a TV and don't need to buy one for a console, most people also have a PC and don't need to buy a new Chasis, HDD, DVD drive, PSU, Fans, monitor, M&KB and all that other jazz, you only upgrade what's necessary.
And more power to do what with, run the same games? If a game can only be released on PC, wouldn't that make it demanding by default?
Run the same games as a console, only loading faster, playing smoother, looking better, and with modifications to make it more entertaining, or playing PC exclusive games.
And PC exclusive games are only demanding to the extent you make them. Have a low end rig? Only do small skrimishes in the Total War games - maybe 200 units apiece, and play on small maps in Sins of a Solar Empire - Single star with up to 20 planets.
Have a top of the line rig? Hold some crazy battles in the Total War games - 4 factions with 2000-3000 or more units each, or play some massive maps in Sins - 12 star 426 planet maps [Of course you'll likely have designed this yourself as the normal large maps don't have so many planets and stars, but that's an in game feature that's easy to use, or a more powerful out of game feature that's easier to use, but requires downloading].
The better your rig, the larger the scale of battles and worlds you can simulate at once, and the more fun you can have. That and the faster it will all load, the smoother it will all run, and the better it will all look.
So if all you want is to run games, why pay more for a PC that will make them look a little bit better?
Mods, Community patches, PC exclusives, Steam, the Indie market, the fact that I will boot up my PC 7 seconds slower than my friend can boot up his console, but I'll boot up, start a game and load its save file 12 seconds faster than my friend can do so on his console thanks to my SSD, and levels in games load so fast I don't even get to see the tips on that screen. My games don't just look a little better, they look a ton better, run at 2-3 times the resolution a console will show them at, and get better framerates, resulting in a smoother experience for me. The Mouse and Keyboard are controls exclusive to PC gaming, and are more precise and flexible than controllers are, emulators, the ability to do things other than gaming and multimedia on it and a whole lot more. Graphics are only the least of the benefits PC gaming has.
Unless you somehow built a machine that can run top of the age PC games on high settings. for a lower price than a console.
Not as hard as it may sound, especially if you upgrade. And especially around here.
Living where I do, the PS3 was launched for $1000. For that money I was able to but a PC that ran all games on highest settings until BF3 and TW2, which it ran on second to highest in both cases, with 60+ FPS. I upgraded it this year by choice to get those to games to run on maximum settings, as well as allowing it to multitask better, load faster and hold more data.
As shown on pages previous, assuming you have all but a Mobo, some RAM, a CPU and a GPU that will work - which isn't to much to ask. Basically, if you have a desktop, this is you - it is possible to build a good rig for under $300 that will quite likely outspec next gen consoles.
sumanoskae said:
But if all you want is good enough, why do you need a PC? If you can't get the cash to afford all the bells and whistles, what's the advantage of not just playing on consoles.
A better question is what is the advantage of playing on a console?
You can get a PC that runs games better than a console would - faster loading times, better FPS, fancier graphics, with mods, on higher resolutions - for around the same price - see the previous few pages. It can do anything a console can do, often better, so why get the Console.
Your PC doesn't have to be unstable, it just has to function a differently than the developers assumed it would.
Same goes for consoles really, hence backwards flying dragons and game breaking lag in Skyrim.
To the average person the words "nVidia GeForce 680" or "Intel i7 2600k" don't mean anything,
Thanks to laziness rather than difficulty. Its the same as distinguishing between a PS3 and a Xbox in that case, its just that they are interested in the PS3 and Xbox and thus can distinguish. Were they to want to learn it would take the whole of 5 minutes to realize higher Ghz = better, and higher graphics card # = better. Or, you know, Google "Good graphics card" and "Good CPU".
Despite that, such knowledge is only really useful if building a computer. For actually using one it is almost entirely irrelevant.
so when all your cables are listed with bizarre abbreviations, it's pretty easy to connect one of them incorrectly.
Who reads the labels these days?
My logic:
"Hmm. It has 8 pins. That socket has 8 holes. It must go there", and amazingly, it does.I'll grant points on things like the power buttons and their cables when assembling, but that's easy enough that you don't have to worry about what each does, just plug the "PBO" or W/E plug into the "PBO" or W/E socket.
Are you honestly going to tell me you've never had a virus on your PC? Even if you haven't, other people who use your PC might. Some default security programs are useless, and I've heard a couple even lie to you.
Lets see...
Uhh...
Nope. I've had one on my USB that I used to kill a couple of computers at school a while back to get out of doing work, but beyond that nothing. Hell, if anything the antiviruses I've used have been to protective, blocking mods claiming they were viruses until I told them to STFU and just let it do its thing.
The worst I'm likely to have gotten is Spyware, and they'll be getting nothing off my PC with that as I have nothing essential on it. Despite that, I probably don't even have a lot of them considering my Internet browsing habits are the Escapist, Gmail and Youtube - oh, and Google for information, though generally the search results tell me everything I need to know without clicking on the links.
All 360's are essentially the same machine, this isn't true of PC's, so there are always more variables for the developers to overlook.
There are, however, drivers. Generally PCs can be split into two sects - Radeon vs NVidia, or Intel vs AMD. Each releases their drivers, and in the end I can see it being similar in many ways to Xbox vs PS3. Developers also have access to these drivers, and are told what to expect from upcoming updates, whilst the driver developers work to make games run better with their drivers. Granted it'll still probably end up more complicated, but I don't see it being as bad as a lot of people make out.
Similarly, however, developing for a console is hard. Rather than having to worry about different drivers and OSs, you have to worry about power. You have to optimize to get games to fit on as few disks as possible, to load within a reasonable time, to generally play at 30FPS and do so whilst improving how the games look, and giving them bigger worlds. On the PC this is not near as much of a problem, as they have more than enough power to handle poorly optimized stuff.
Of course, I doubt either of us is actually in the game industry, so we don't really have that great an idea about such things, however John Carmack has said the following:
A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it.
http://www.gamefront.com/carmack-we-do-not-see-the-pc-as-the-leading-platform-for-games/
Basically, given the same budget to make a PC game as to make a console game, the PC game would turn out better. This may seem obvious, but that indicates that getting it set up for all kinds of different PCs is less of a hurdle than making a game actually run decently on a console.
Or if you don't want to set time aside to learn how to set up a game you already parted with $60 for.
Honestly, this is a non issue.
How to set up a PC game:
Put disk in.
Click "Install"
Hit Yes and Next and "I agree" when they pop up.
Wait a variable amount of time [On low end rigs, up to and over half an hour. On high end rigs, as low as 5 to 10 minutes for large games, and 2 to 3 for small].
Hit Finish, and double click the icon.
And viola, game installed and working.
If you're trying to get an old game working you may have to activate compatibility mode and Run as Administrator, but that's about as difficult as, if not easier than, finding out if your PS3 is backwards compatible or not.
Drivers are 99.95% of the time a non-issue. I have had one game that required a new driver install, and that was TW2 thanks to me forgetting to uninstall my old drivers when I installed a new one. The fix took about 10 minutes to Google and find out how to do it, and then actually doing it was another 5. This was with no idea what the problem was at the start.
Arina Love said:
5 years ago i bought mid-range PC for 740$ and later that year i bought PS3 for 650$. 5 years later my PC can't run new games at playable fps in 720p but my PS3 runs every new game perfectly fine.
I doubt that PC was mid range, sorry. If it can't run new games at a playable FPS as low as 720p, it wasn't mid range 5 years ago.
My mid range rig from 8 years ago ran Everything up to BF3 and TW2 at Maximum settings with 60+ FPS at 720p, and the last two on second highest with 60+ FPS.
