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AnthonyW86 on 19 October 2015
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zero129 said:
AnthonyW86 said:
zero129 said:

I agree with you that this gen is less high gen then other games, and yes that does mean you don't have to spend as much on a PC to get a ''next gen'' console like experience. But that's not all, progress in PC power has just slowed down a lot in recent years. Especially price-performance wise.

Let me give an example: I still have a AMD HD5850 1gb in my PC. That card launched 6 years ago in 2009, and cost about € 230. It was the most popular card back then.

Right now the most popular card in that price range is probably the Nvidia GTX 960 2GB. That card is just about twice as fast as the HD5850, and it has twice the memory etc. So about a doubling in price/performance in 6 years.

Now if i look back to 6 years before the HD5850 in 2003, i owned a Radeon 9700 128mb AGP. Know that card cost about € 300 euro's. Comparing that to an HD5850 it is probably about 20 times faster than that 9700, and it packs almost ten times the memory. And it's actually cheaper to.

As you can see there has been a huge slow down in progress. And looking at consoles allthough PS4 uses a mid-end gpu from well over three years ago, a current € 200 9600 GTX is barely any faster. Again compare that to an HD5850 witch released three years after the PS3(a console with higher end specs), the HD5850 runs circles around the PS3's 7800/7900 gpu and has twice as much video memory as an entire PS3 system(at 5 times the speed).

True i understand exactly what you mean. I guess that when it comes to hardware where just getting to the point where its slowing down across the board. Now that could be that we have hit a point where the return on power just isnt as noticable if you get what i mean?. Like we all know even if the PS4 and X1 are deemed weak in comparasion to PC hardware compared to lastgen, but they are still 2 consoles thats much more powerful then the PS3 and X360 but yet like i said i feel like other then higher res and better textures the is not much more then we had lastgen.

Like the jump imo is not as big as it was from PS2 to PS3 or at least not as noticable;. I think the same thing is pretty much happining with PC too where its getting to the stage that all that extra power just simply is not making the games look much better, as it being used for things people might not notice as much, and the gpu makers know they can get away with rebranding cards and releasing cards that might give a person an extra 5-6FPS but cost a lot more, where as the jumps where much bigger in the past.

I agree with you absolutely, you can clearly see the effect of diminishing returns. Though the difference in power between this gen and last gen is pretty big. That's why i am glad they didn't go overboard with more expensive hardware. Let's say Sony hade gone for a GTX 680, that's like twice as fast as PS4 i think? At most probably You would not have seen much difference(there is notable difference between PS4 and XBone either). So if that would have made PS4 cost € 500 it would not have been worth it. Not to mention it would have heated up like a toaster.

I have my doubts where high-end PC gaming will go from here. 4K VR gaming could be a pretty big leap, but with the current progression in calculating power it will be a long time before that becomes playable. Let alone affordable. Other than that i don't see it.

So indeed no surprise you are seeing affordable PC rigs pop up more and more, not much use shelling out more cash.