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| freedquaker said: There is no question that the latest graphics on PCs will always outshine the consoles after 2-3 years on their lifetime. On the other hand, the console graphics usually look considerably better when they are first released before catchup of the PC and look better for a long time than the average PC (not the new/high end PCs). The problem with gaming on PC is not only about price, but lack of smoothness and stability of the consoles. When you buy a console, you know that every game for it will run from day 1 till the end of its life. I don't think console games look considerably better at first. Better, yes, but considerably? Compared to average PCs they look considerably better, though, as you said. People forget something, who claim that a PC which is bought now will have a reasonable price and be much more powerful than the consoles. That's kind of true but confined to a very narrow outlook. Let's assume that you have bought a console on the same day as Xbox 360 was released back in 2005. You paid like $400 for 360 and like $800 for the PC (general purpose, gaming + other things, so the price is ok). And lets assume that the life of 360 is around 6-7 years. So I will be able to play all the games on it till 2011-12 with an almost perfectly smooth and stable experience. Let's see what's going to happen with the games on PC. At least every game will look better on PC in 2011. - Most games require huge installs, and many other tweaks, in order to start playing the game, you need to give extra effort and time. What tweaks? Installation is pretty much the only thing to do before starting up a game. Well, at least that's the case for me... Of course I like to download the newest patch but in most cases it's not exactly necessary. As for the size of the installs, it doesn't matter. PCs have huge HDDs anyway and new HDDs are way cheaper than on consoles. Besides, loading times will be faster than when loading from a disc (DVD/BD). - You will have many problems on the way, some of them will be incompatible with your system due to some unknown freaking reason, system conflict, whatever. That's a nice argument there; you weren't very specific. Problems like that are pretty rare. - Let's just not forget the virus, spyware and other god darn problems! That's not related to the PC but to the user. Catching a virus or spyware isn't too easy unless you go on suspicious sites and download suspicious stuff. - For the first few years, most games will work with few problems, but game will not run as smooth and as stable as on the consoles. Because of the million different type of PCs out there, your configuration is too specific to be optimised for. The experience should be smooth enough if you don't select too high settings. Besides, FPS in general is better on the PC than on consoles. The optimization thing is true, although I don't consider it to be a big problem in the end. - After a couple of years, there will be a significant number of games that you either cannot run or can run on very low settings, losing a lot of the graphics, smoothnees and gameplay stability. Depends on what kind of a PC you buy. If you're expecting every PC on the market to be a gaming PC, you'll definitely run into problems. However, if you do some research you can easily find a PC that runs games pretty well for a few years and after that, upgrading will be pretty cheap (and it's not hard, either, if you have any knowledge - and you can get knowledge on the web). Oh, and at that point the games are likely to look good even on low settings. - For the last few years, there will be only a handfull of games that are playable on your computer, some of them not even at optimal solutions. See the paragraph I just wrote... - Your PC which was bought on the same day of the 360's release almost never outshined its competitor. The graphics on the PC usually had little or no improvement on its life cycle due to the lack of optimization for your hardware, but they could possibility get even worse as you'd play future games at lower settings etc. The console graphics have improved considerably on the other hand as game developers had better optimizations for the specific hardware. Who would actually want to buy a PC at the same moment as a console gets released? Sure, you can do that, but it might not be the optimal moment. - In Summary, PC graphics will outdo the console graphics only if you buy a new PC or make a hefty upgrade every one or two years. There's some truth in that but I wouldn't call in entirely true. |
See the green bolded parts (yup, they're written by me). Now, let's compare PC and PS2 games during the end of PS2's lifetime, shall we? Actually we can do that even earlier and have the same result.
