The Economist: "The newest games consoles look underpowered and similar to PCs."

[Pemalite]

SvennoJ said:

Since I trade in a lot of games the saving money argument with pc is not always true. Steam is convenient but after buying a new laptop I now have to budget which games I install per month due to annoying bandwidth cap. It's click, have a lot of patience, then play. First download for a long time, then install directx, update drivers, couple more install steps. Then if you don't have the latest gpu find a good balance between performance and looks, which you usually have to adjust a couple of times during play. And several times now Steam prompted me it has to convert local game files for an update, I click go ahead, and it times out with a no connection error. No play. Couple days later it worked, not convenient at all.

So I use pc mostly for indie games and play the big games on consoles, costs less time and bandwidth, plus money back for the next game if it doesn't turn out to be a keeper.

Anyway I haven't had a virus either in years, and still haven't according to my virus scanner. Maybe my isp is wrong. I've downloaded trend micro free scan which is running now, nothing found yet. I can give Eset Nod32 a trial run next. Frustrating.

Don't get me started on bandwidth caps, it's the bane of all Australians.
Luckily my Internet provider provides completely unlimited Steam and Xbox Live downloads, so it never counts as my usage. :)
However, to me it sounds like your ISP isn't exactly gamer oriented or providing good value, maybe time to change providers? It's not really a PC centric issue anyway, the future is digital distribution, regardless of platform, consoles will catch up eventually, maybe next generation.

As for trading games, you don't really gain anything out of it, the amount of money you loose during everytime you trade a game is essentially a Steam game, or... Mirrors Edge+Battlefield 3+Burnout Paradise+Crysis 2+Dead Space+Medal of Honor+Sims 3+Command and Conquer and Populas during the EA Humble bundle which was about $5, which you also keep forever. :)

You are also making the PC seem more trouble than it really is, today out side of maybe... A couple of games, you can run everything on a 4 year old high-end GPU (Radeon 5870) at 1920x1080 with everything on max, nor do you need to update your drivers every time you play a game, often I might run with drivers several months old, I'm running Triple Radeon's in Eyefinity, if there really were massive issues, I would be the first to know due to having a relatively complex set-up.
Steam will also automatically Install Direct X and Visual Basic Runtime, you don't have to click anything to manually start that process and it only needs to be done once for that particular game.

As for Steam converting data, it does that from time to time, generally for games you downloaded a fairly long time ago and mostly for various reasons, it's a painless exercise and doesn't take that long on my Raid drives, I've never had the time out issue, so I would place it down to your ISP or your particular PC.

I essentially have a completely utterly trouble free PC gaming experience, certainly nothing like you have proclaimed at any rate.

ithis said:

i.e. the machine architecture itself is optimised for games (I'm not talking about the discrete components of the machine but how they comunicate with each other) - these are no PCs that do that. Plus these deidcated gaming machines will GREATLY benefit from the fixed hardware that will allow for far better optimisations, again something that a PC will not receive. This will make these machines puch MUCH above their aparent weight.

I disagree with your opinion.
If anything, the consoles will have less of an optimisation advantage over comparable PC's. Why? Because it's architecture even right down to the CPU's instructions is essentially the same, developers this time around can assume from a hardware feature standpoint... Is Identical, thus they will be using abstraction layers for several years at-least. (Then they will start getting down into the metal.)
Of course you get a little bloat due to Windows, but that's made up for by the several Teraflops performance advantage.

Now, if you want to look at optimisations, just take a look at the origional Crysis.
The PC version would run on max settings with the Direct X 9 path on hardware comparable to the consoles, yet the console version looked like utter crap in comparison.

Grab any Call of Duty game, it looked and ran better on PC's even if you are stuck with a Core 2 Duo and Geforce 7950, it just didn't push the hardware.

However, most Multi-platforms implemented improvements over their console counterparts, we are talking multiples higher resolution textures, with better Anti-Aliasing (No Morphological in my house, folks!), higher Anisotropic Filtering, better lighting and shadows, better framerates and higher resolutions and even things like HBAO/SSAO and Tessellation, those kinds of improvements don't come free, hence why the PC needs better hardware compared to consoles.
Take Battlefield 3 for instance, it's almost half the game on the consoles from a graphics (And player count! :P) point of view.