Crysis on the lowest settings looks like a PS2 game.

Also, with that video card, he will not be able to play those games. Here is a chart, the slowest card on this list is a lot faster then a 9600se.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html

Right now there is a shift in how pcs are marketed and packaged. Instead of low-med-high end you're getting Basic, Gaming, Media and Ultimate packages. Soon a lot of the price premium will evaporate and we will start to see some very nice affordable packages. You can see this happening in laptops already.

The ability to play Crysis is irrelevant to this discussing anyway! It was not targeted at todays graphics cards but tomorrows. But with the 9800gx2 you can almost max it, and come July we will see the new Nvidia cards roll out and im sure THEN you will see crysis maxed.

Lastly, need I remind people of the $10 difference in game costs? You can still ebay your games if you really want to anyway. PC games drop in cost faster also. So you can easily save 100-200 a year on game costs and that will be enough to keep your GPU and RAM current.

For those saying that they become obsolete fast, consider the current situation. 8800gtxs and 8800gts (g80) are still current enough to play all games. Owners of those cards won't even need to upgrade until sometime next year at the earliest.

Crysis on lowest settings looks better than any PS2/GC/Xbox game, and looks better than 90% of Wii games, including Metroid Prime 3 (the lack of AA is a bitch though on Crysis)

and 9600se can run Crysis. Hell even my old Geforce 6200se Turbocache ran Crysis, and that GPU is worse than 9600se I believe. A Crytek dev himself said that the official minimum requirements aren't the absolute minimum, you can run Crysis with a GPU worse than a Geforce 6800.

The main reason I see to buy a console over a pc for gaming is that with a console you know you are getting the full experience out of a game. I don't like running games at anything less than Full everything. I feel cheated when you get a game for the pc and you cant run it on ultra everything. Yeah in a  few years medium will kill a 360 or a PS3 but I don't care. Buying a pc for crysis for however much it was that can run it well on *medium* seems like a waste to me. Medium is for the weak.

One of the major reasons PC gaming is so expensive, is because every port of a console game feels the need to push the envelope with graphics.

So, in other words, if you have a 360 equivelant PC, you still can't play Crysis or Assassin's Creed.



Honestly, though, the plug and play aspect of consoles, without having to mess with all the stuff involved with computers, is why console gaming will always win out with the majority.


Remember that time you bought a computer game, got it home, installed it, and it wouldn't play. Huge dissapointment. Makes you think computer games aren't the entities that console games are, when they are in your hands.

Frankly, they are not. Console games come with kind of a guarntee. "I will work on a universal console"

PC games come with worry. "I might not work on your PC and nobody will ever be able to figure out why."


I play my PC often, Psychonauts, SH4 The Room, World of Warcraft.

Yet, I wouldn't trade the gaming capabilities of my PC for any of my consoles.


I think I'm just a console gamer at heart, and I always will be.

Others are like me. Hence, console sales.

Gaming PCs do NOT have a stratospheric cost of entry anymore and anyone who thinks otherwise is wilfully ignorant or perhaps has just never been to newegg.

But the cost is still much higher than consoles, partly because you need to upgrade at least 2 or 3 times as often as the consoles switch over if you want to keep up with the latest games. And I don't mean "CPU, GPU, RAM that's 3 haha".

I'd say that instead of "basic new computer + Wii = gaming PC", it's more like "decent used computer + PS3 = gaming PC and you'd better start saving for the upgrades in 12-18 months"

Thing is even if your PC is crap and the game won't look as good as the console version, you are still NOT getting the full experience with the console version, since the PC version has better controls, more costumization, modding, etc...

 $600 PC = Crysis on High Settings. So a PC that run Crysis on medium is even cheaper, possibly around $400/$450. And by the way, there is still no console game that is as impressive as Crysis on Medium.

Don't forget that consoles actually run a fraction of those resolutions. I believe COD4 is actually rendered at 1064x600 or something along those lines, which is about 1/4th the resolution of 1920x1200.

Breaking news: current HD consoles are two generations behind in video performance and can't compete with computers built at the same price point. Update at 11.

Consoles are very limited with memory. Both the 360 and PS3 have 512MB of usable memory for running the machine, doing everything within the game, storing textures, etc. The memory architectures are different, but the bottom line is that memory is a hard constraint that will keep them from looking even close to as good as PCs with mid range hardware.

A PC builder right now can buy memory for $10/gigabyte for the main system, and he could buy a 512MB Geforce 8800GT (several times more powerful than either the 360 or PS3's video rendering) for about $160.

The PS3 has approximately a Geforce 7600 in it, right? 

"can't compete with computers built at the same price point."

Show me the computer built at a $279 price point that plays CoD4, please. The PS3 is only comparable to gaming PCs because of Blu-ray.

Posting in a PC thread.

So, who likes strawberries?