No its not your graphicsscard alone costs 300€/$ for example

Was
2008 PC specs required


Now is
2009 PC specs required +8 or more GB of ram.

-i am a former pc gamer.

There's the problem, if you're a former why do you post news of PC?, why did you leave PC gaming?, you can call me PC only based on how you think I'm defending my stance but really I'm multiplatform that's been on consoles more than PC his entire life but I know facts, I know lies and I actively read up sources, you're a former PC gamer so I don't expect you to go to PC gamer, read up on new parts and technologies within the PC space along with watching users like linus Tech (otherwise you'd list more than one poorly edited source article).

See I only needed to look at the comments section of that article to find the majority are calling the author's credability and how poorly written the article was, they explain their side of sense with facts and they didn't have to resort to mentioning "hyperthreading" (which hardly many games make use of let alone use to it;s full potential anyway and won't for a few years) and "alienware", you see that's where most misguided authors/people fall into, they mention alienware who are known for their over the tope expensive hardware along with their lack of credability to the public, you should never ever have to throw in alienware in your article to prove a point, they are not the point and certainly not the end all to be all.

- 4 months is not old, this is not news but an interesting article

actually 4 months can be old when technology is constantly improving, you could say 5 years in gaming time is not old but look how time flies within the gaming world and a lot has come and gone since 5 years ago, when you have tech and games advancing at a fast rate 4 months worth of information in regards to improving games and tech can and will be outdated.

What made it such an interesting article to you anyway?, it's outdated and you're a former PC user, it can only be interesting to you because of how the author throws up misinformation and tries to make PC's out to be doomed and completely at fault while mentioning no fault of devs and the closed weaker hardware of the consoles themselves, It's not that type of "oh jolly good *nod nod* great feed of information" type of read, unless you think one side being made out as doomed with the information being played out wrong as some form of interesting read, it most likely plays into what we're seeing in response on this thread such as "glad I'm console only" which feeds that nice myth that PC gaming is doomed and super difficult and so expensive we'd ened to win the lotto.

Captain Yuri was spot on when he said "Shame really but I guess it is a bit expected since quite a few members of this site isn't very kind to PC gamers to say the least even though most PC gamers on this site love consoles", anything to make the preference look good and it's almost always cases like this, just look at the IGN DS 2 PS4 vs PC/360/PS3 pitch, go look at the comments section for both the YT video and IGN itself and look what sprouted from that.

I like consoles that appeal to me, I've got a 3DS, I'm going for a Wii U now that I've got more hours under my belt to pay for it and eventually a XB1 but I've never once felt like throwing down £400 on a single platform and then resorting to buyers remorse/stockholm syndrome to make my lack of choices seem more factually appealing, when it comes to PC you'll find they aren't doing that because 1. they craft the PC themselves with individual parts and 2. they know what they are building and are learning more from the hobby they got into, they have access to the facts that PC hardware brings, there's hardly much downplay (besides fanboys which all sides have in equal measure) when it comes to PC facts, PC's after all make the games in the first place, they should be able to play them from the machine they were designed on, it being mortally impossible is due to the devs themselves, if it can't run on min, medium or high spec that is their fault not the hardware, look at Ubisoft and their shitty coding for example, entirely their fault, all those bugs were never the fault of PC's.

- so youre blaming the others? but its fact that pcs were never good for optimisation. Why should devolopers spent the extra time figuring out how to run 8 core games for every 2 or 4 pc? You allready can see that in shadow of morder how they removed the nemesis system from ps3 and xbox 360 downgrading a gameplay element so these low core machines can run it. I dont think pc gamers would like it either

Blaming what others?, the current gen? the devs?, I can blame both since devs have shown that they can poorly program games, take a look at early access and look no further at Ass Creed Unity, mistakes can always be made but that doesn't always excuse bad coding/optomisation, not in the least, current gen can be blamed if the ports are coming straight from them since their hardware is factually weaker and outdated as time passes (say that about PC parts but they aren't closed hardware and can be modified while consoles cannot), this gen we're already seeing both XB1 and PS4 making sacrifices left and right, if they were as powerful as claimed then why can they not go for both?, I've seen PC games that can achieve both, I've seen compintent PC ports that can do both, I've seen Skyrim do 3-4k textures on PC without causing complete nuclear meltdown, hell I've seen most PC games if not a lot do 60fps and support higher resolutions from the past, there's some that even support higher than 1920x1080, consoles this gen are factually going to be stuck at the 1080p res, within the next few eyars PC will have already jumped onto 4k, if consoles can't support 4k by the time PC's can then that factually means consoles lag behind, ergo they aren't as powerful as people make them out to be, that's just a fact of how it works, PC issues and console issues are not two way streets, one is closed hardware and doesn't make it's own games while the other makes games for every platform known to man and is open in terms of software and hardware, there shouldn't be massive issues with being open, those that don't do a good job are lazy when someone else can do it, if someone else can then you've buggered up somewhere, another fact of life, it;s not impossible to make good PC ports without throwing up crazy spec requirements.

That's pretty much the only thing that costs money anymore, and you won't need a $300 one for console equivalent gaming. You can go budget on CPU, RAM and Mboard these days and a mid-tier GPU will be able to make up for the rest. CPUs haven't been particularly important in PC gaming for a few years now and 8GB of RAM has been standard for the last few years.

If you use a basic PC for work, adding a mid tier GPU allows you to play most games now, often with better quality or performance than the consoles.

For instance, my upper mid-tier 2013 build (i5 2500, 8Gig RAM, 2GB AMD HD7870), which would be even cheaper to build now is still regularly outperforming the PS4 and X1 on both graphics quality, resolution and/or performance.

Actually it cost $170($220 before) after rebate. $300 gets you a 290x. 

It's definitely not getting cheaper for PC gamers. Most of the current gen games run like shit on ultra and high end cards. We're not gonna have much fun until the devs try to code proper for PC.

We can't even think about 4K right now without massive graphical downgrades and multi GPUs. Wouldn't be surprised if we're still not at 4k in 5 years with single GPUs.

@ bolded

That's over-inflated bullshit. I've noticed a few devs say this now about their PC games (Wolfenstein being another) where the "minimum" specs are what you need to run the game with Ultra textures, high res, some ridiculous anti-aliasing solution and 60+ FPS.I'm begining to wonder if Intel, nVidia & AMD are paying them to over-inflate the specs.

Fact is, a half decent i3 with mid-tier GPU can run the majority of games these days at higher graphical fidelity than consoles.

No,the reason for buggy ports are lazy and cheap developers.They don't take the time or use their resources to insure that each copy of the game is well designed.Porting in general is lazy.Each game needs to be built specifically for the platform which is why exclusives far outshine multiplat games on every platform.

That chart you show is has an nvidia gtx 780ti in it a 400$/€ graphicscard and its for 720p not 1080p, so alot of the work does the gpu there in all fearness.

And yes youre forced to upgrade your pc after 4-5 years. I have a corei7 the original 920 with 6gb of ram tripple channel, both seem to be fine now. But my graphicscards are 2x260s in sli, the gtx 260 is a much much stronger graphicscard what the ps3 has yet just because its not dx11 i wont be able to run almost any new game.

The ps3 and xbox 360 to this day get still ports from new upcoming games who will require dx11 on pc. Games like the evil within wont run because its a dx10 graphicscard in my computer despite having a corei7 cpu. While the ps3 got a version of the evil within having technicaly a dx9 gpu, the nvidia gtx 7800. I build my pc in 2009 by the way. 

I dont see a point why i should upgrade my graphicscard for 300€ instead just buying a 400€ ps4 that costs pretty much the same and gives me tons of exclusives and physical media support.

The writer could have complained about these new gen consoles games on PC take up more harddrive space but he didn't... No doubt we'll get 20+ gb games reguraly from now on .. While i have a speedy internet connection i still don't wanna redownload stuff..