LMAO, nice try shio....

And Crysis doesn't play at very high settings with playable frame rates on a $400 PC, even assuming the $100 OEM copy of Windows was free.

Not unless you crank down the resolution or are playing on a very small display which pretty much defeats the purpose of all that detail.

I love building overclocked systems as much as the next PC guy, but seriously, you have to call BS when you smell it.

A build that played very high settings, let alone mod extreme settings would require about a $200-300 CPU (a highly overclocked E8400 $165 CPU is about rock bottom for this performance level) and a $300 plus dual GPU VGA solution (at least the equivalent of a HD4870x2) for realistically playable frame rates (no less than 30 fps) at resolutions above 1680x1050 without turning off AA.

That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Anyone who says building a cheap overclocked PC for gaming is easier than buying an Xbox and plugging it into an HDTV has his reality distortion field set to "Full."

Yes it's same as Very High.

I wouldn't even bother slimebeast, you know shio is NEVER wrong (yeah right) lol

Alright there is a clear difference between art styles on the PC and art styles on the consoles. The consoles have better artists... so it's hard to draw any conclusion unless you measure everything on a technical standpoint, ie: resolution, polygons per second etc. In which case the consoles were way behind the PC even when they first released.

Already. To be honest, its the consoles holding back PC graphics as they are being used as the benchmark for a lot of FPS titles (which were the games normally driving a lot of graphics leaps).

So the tech is way ahead, but only a few games are exploiting the full power available on PCs currently vs HD consoles.

Exactly. My PC is worth more than 700€ ($1000+)

My E8400 runs at 3.6GHz and my HD4890 is overclocked too, but there is no way I can set the resolution to 1900x1200 or 8x AA when everything else is on Very High.

Tried those extreme graphic configs and it was not playable (~20FPS)

It further helps my case. Imagine if GTA IV was optimized, the game would've been able to get an even better Top Settings and have lower specs. Optimization aside, it doesn't change the fact that the console versions are only around the low settings of the PC version.

Steam:

1. Power on PC
2. Buy Game
3. Download Game
4. Play

After you bought the game is like

1. Power on PC
2. Play

Steam even streamlines patches and updates, so that you never need to hunt them down.

Console:

1. Go to Store
2. Buy Game
3. Go Back Home
4. Power on Console
5. Put in Disk
6. Play
7. Put Disk Away After Played

After you bought the game is like

1. Power on Console
2. Put in Disk
3. Play
4. Put Disk Away After Played

A $400 PC still plays Crysis on High Settings, which consoles are unable to. And don't even speak of resolution when most top console games aren't even true HD.

And it's funny you base your argument on resolution. You see, when games like GTA IV, Halo 3, etc.... are around 600p on consoles, you can't criticise PC gamers, because 600p is nearly the minimum resolution that PC games allow these days. Console gamers are basically playing on PC's minimum resolutions.

The artists working with console platforms may just be optimizing their in-game resources better. Console developers in general are much better at achieving more efficient results with less hardware resources out of necessity. Nothing new there.

You really can't tell with just a handful of screen shots that aren't even native res frame grabs.

Until I actually play Crysis 2 or whatever Crytek 3 Engine game comes out first on both hardware platforms, my opinion won't change, but I have a hard time not seeing a pretty noticeable gap on a fast rig with a new DX11 card.

Whether that translates to a generational leap in visuals remains to be seen though.

And yes, it would be nice to have something other than Crysis as an excuse to build a decent gaming PC.