| JackHandy said: I am not a PC gamer, although I wish I was. But with PC gaming, I believe part of the beauty of it is in just how much more freedom there is, including pricing. Simply put, you have far more options. If you want to make a machine on a budget, you can. If you want the top of the line rig that can destroy a small nation with the push of a button, you can do that, too. So the answer to the OP is... it depends. |
I used to be a PC gamer and yes, you have as many options on PC as you would like.
But then I got less and less time for gaming (and tinkering with PC) so all the benefits of PC rather became a hindrance. PC is great when you play a lot, consoles are better if you just play something occasionally. No need to think about configurations, graphic options, wondering if it would run better if you upgrade one thing or another, no distractions from alt-tab, no Windows OS to navigate around.
It's a balance with PC. You can get pretty far with a budget machine, but then you need to be aware what the bottleneck is and what you can run comfortably and what will take effort and compromises to run. Of course console on a budget is still cheaper, refurbished consoles beat budget PCs.
You can go high end making it easy to run everything out now, but that's far more costly than a console and you'll be spending more time at finding good parts on sale. Plus more frequent updates if you want to stay at the top end.
Economically the HW is not really comparable since if you want to compare it with a brand new $1000 PS6, then you should compare it to an equivalent brand new pre-build PC. And if you want to compare console gaming to a budget PC, then you should compare it to refurbished console prices.
Where the big savings on PC are is in the games. There's much more competitive pricing on PC, far more sales, far more cheap games, you can run everything old. So if you're into 'retro' gaming / not interested in the latest GPU busters, then a budget PC will give you far more to play for far cheaper than 2nd hand console game prices.
So it comes down to how much do you value / price your time at. Just interested in playing the latest AAA blockbuster for a couple hours a week, might as well stick to consoles. Dedicated box, resume from standby, you're back in the game in seconds.
Interested in multiplayer games, couple hours a day, don't mind tinkering with settings now and then, go PC. Free online, cheaper games, the investment in the hardware will pay itself off easily.
One more point is convenience. Console under the TV is still more practical (and more acceptable by a spouse ;) than a desktop. PC is still mostly geared on you sitting close enough to read all the small fonts. Sure you can boot straight into Steam big picture mode, but now and then you'll have to fiddle with Windows and other settings.
And one other big pro for PC is mods of course. The last game I spend tons of time on PC (gaming laptop) was FS2020. I upgraded to 32GB ram for it to run better, balanced the graphic settings with my laptop's capabilities editing the configuration files to fine tune, switch options literally on the fly (while flying) to adjust depending on terrain and altitude. (steady and what kind of frame rate is up to you).
Then several add-ons to follow my journey along with Google maps. (I even used an add-on to replace Bing maps with Google maps in the game as Google maps has way better detail in Canada, made the game twice as sharp, but that's also depending on where you fly) And my favorite aircraft was a free mod from FlyByWire. Their A320 was the most realistically modeled plane (at the time at least) where you could follow the start up procedures to shut down procedures at the other end exactly as irl. Practially all the buttons in the cockpit worked as intended.
That was worth the crashes, having to restart for memory problems, long loading times, frequent tinkering and fine tuning (and having to do it again after each monthly update changing things) simply because I was flying every single day. So all the 'extra' stuff didn't feel like much.
In contrast, the game I played extensively before that was Elite Dangerous. I can't get into that anymore as I fell behind in updates and my gaming laptop fell behind the game as well, doesn't run well anymore. There's no quick jump in for an hour or so, got to basically start from scratch again. At least with consoles you can be pretty certain a patch isn't going to break the game on your hardware. (Not that it happens often on PC, but it has happened a couple time to me, as well as some games simply refusing to run without a clue why. Be prepared most of the 'help' on PC forums is: User fault, you're trying to run it on a potato)
So yeah it can go both ways. Depends on your time and affinity / willingness to deal with the technical stuff. The more you know, the more efficient and cheaper builds you can make instead of gamble on a pre-build machine. Where you soon find out, got to upgrade the PSU if you want a more powerful GPU, but that can use faster RAM as well, now the CPU in the bottleneck. However the budget 3060 PC I bought my youngest 4 years ago still handles everything he plays very well and that cost as much as a PS5 Pro + disc drive at release. Was still twice as much as a base PS5 though.
