So I just built a PC and here's my take on the whole Consoles VS PC argument

[Scoobes]

AnthonyW86 said:

zero129 said:

AnthonyW86 said:
I've noticed that PC gaming seems to shift a bit more to budget these days. And the hard fact is, development in PC hardware just hasn't been that fast or interesting in recent years.

I used to be a real PC hardware fanatic, upgrading on a regular basis. But now i have a PC that i upgraded for the last time 5 years ago. And it's sitting still ever since i got a PS4.

I think that's a big issue to these days, there just isn't that much for hardware enthousiasts to be enthousiastic about.

I think one of the biggest parts to play in this is that with the consoles launching with such low specs not many devs are really willing to push games on PC other then better textures, res, draw distance lighting etc etc. But then in a sense thats really all the nextgen consoles offer above the lastgen. This is the very first gen i have not felt the need to own one of the nextgen consoles thanks to my pc. Every other gen one of the new consoles would end up being more powerful then my pc with games looking better then i could play on it unless i spend big bucks. But that trend changed this gen imo.

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).

To be fair, GPUs are due a die shrink. It feels like they've been stuck at 28nm for a long time.

I also think you're seriously underestimating the performance difference between the GTX960 and HD5850.