The fact that game development have shifted towards console so much this gen, and it will keep this way next gen too, means that PC hardware isn't puched as hard as it was before, making your "the average gamer will not spend 200+$ every 18 months on a new GPU or CPU or Ram" sentence completely wrong.

Anyone who owns a i5 2500K CPU or an HD7870 GPU can easily keep them for more than 3 years and still be able to play all the games at the same or better graphical options than their console counterparts. Heck, anyone with an HD4870 or GTX260 can still play all the actual games at a higher resolution, with better graphics or both things at the same time, and those cards are 5 years old!

That's why cards like the HD79xx or Nvidia's GTX670 and higher are reviewed and compared using 3 screens, at "only" 1080p they give more than 100 fps.

Because that's a way of explaining the possible difference between the graphics that each console will be able to give us.

You can take the PC on those comparisons if you want, the fact that PS4 has a better GPU and a faster RAM will mean that, unless there is something else that we don't know (and I'm not talking about the cloud), PS4 will have better graphics than the Xbone and a lot better than WiiU.

Agreed. All I'm saying is that it makes no sense to put standardized machines on the same page as a dynamically changing one.

We are not talking about some PC, we are talking the Hypothetical ideal PC.

No, it's not wrong (at least not completely, since it was a top-of-my-head estimation) you do need some frequent upkeep, quite simply because your assumption that the average gamer has an i5 2500K CPU or an HD7870 is completely groundless and based on steam's statistics inaccurate. That's not widely adopted hardware. You insist on having a restricting definition of what the average gamer is just because it suits your argument.

HD4870 and GTX260 are 2008 cards, also over 200$ and will ONLY give a frame rate at high settings again on the baseless assumption that average gaming joe has 8GB ram and a quad-core CPU. You need constant upkeep because you always need the package, CPU, GPU, RAM. (the CPU is less critical of course but at least a quad core at this point is required)

I'm sorry but I don't get your view here, anyone who games on PC would do as he suggested and go for the highest specs possible with their budget whether building it or buying a PC even an average PC gamer otherwise they wouldn't be gaming on PC, his example about the i5 from what I understand doesn't mean he's saying that's what people will have but that's the ball park people will aim for. The GPU in my current PC cost me 60 quid in a store we have in the UK called maplin who do special offers and sales on PC hardware all the time (they frequently have bundle deals like cases, motherboards, CPU and power supply together) and they're not the only ones, most people build over a period of time so they don't pay one lump sum as well.

In the PC I'm building now I'm doing just like he said by going for an i series CPU etc... he's not that far off with his statement.

Where are you going with this?

Superchunk simply used the basic PC settings (Low for WiiU, Mid for XBone, High for PS4 and Ultra for an expensive top model PC) for the average core PC title as a way of explaining the relative differences between the consoles next gen.

I'm not sure what your argument is. A significant number of people that decide to game on PC may well have average hardware with basic GPUs and simple RAM but then these are still capable of playing many games. At the other extreme you have core PC gamers who frequent forums and build their PCs out of the best hardware for their budget. As a platform it encompasses all.

A little off topic but FYI: Before I upgraded my PC (about 2 yrs ago now) I had an old AMD dual core with an HD 4850 and only 2Gb of RAM. It was still capable of playing most games on High settings at 720 resolution. Games looked better than their console equivalents and other than the CPU heavy games (e.g. Dragon Age Origins, GTA IV), they played relatively smoothly.

Why is there a PC vs Console war going on here while this is a topic for discussing Wii-U, Xbox One and PS4?

You obviously haven't read the posts properly if you think it's PC vs Console.

Ones that have a gaming PC right now who can run current games on high and/or ultra settings will probably still have to upgrade moving into next gen games. They won't have the advantage they have now over consoles. Unless they already made the upgrade to match the new consoles. And then later they will probably need to upgrade again to match/surpass the games that come later in the gen.

I'm guilty for that in the last few posts but my beaf is really simple: the PCs able to hit good framerates @ 1080p & ultra settings are not the norm, they are not the average rig. So it's not "PC - Ultra settings", it's "Hypothetical ideal PC - ultra settings".

I don't think "lowest common denominator" means what you think it means... Lowest common denominator means the lowest point of a range, if they were designing a game to be able to scale down to the Wii U then it would be the lowest common denominator. Modern engines won't help scale to the Wii U ether currently the only next gen engine we know about Unreal Engine 4 will not natively support Wii U so won't help at all. Cryengine 3 and other older engines that are scaled up to next gen do support it tho and Luminous will support X360 and PS3 so that might make it over, but even the spruced up Frostbyte 2/3 doesn't have support for Wii U (despite it already targeting older platforms) so engine support for Wii U in modern engines is already looking sketchy, we will see if Panta Rhei and other such "modern" engines make it over. And before you make the argument of course developers could scale any game down if they really wanted but whether they think it's worth it and whether the resaults will be any good are different questions entirely, already a lot of developers have written off the Wii U while still using old engines and making games that would be easy to scale (in fact most games today are still targeting the weaker X360 and they still don't think the Wii U is worth a port, going the extra mile to down port rather than side port will make it even less likely) so that situation is only going to get worse once games actually start to be designed with a higher common denominator in mind than the X360/PS3 (even most next gen exclusives started development as PS360 games and were scaled up so far).

I suspect most devs will follow Ubisoft's lead and develop scalably on PC (currently with PS360 level being the lowest end, but that will naturally raise over the coming years for most AAA games) and port the apropriate feature set to each console as appropriate anyway. Which will mean that they can make effective use of all available hardware, the lowest common denominator will remain X360 for most games for the next couple years anyway.

Updating throughout day.