How do next-gen consoles stack up against PCs for VFM? *spawn

[Arwin]

Theoretical of course, because I'm not sure that the PC version of a game will perform as well as a PS4 version of a game, even if all hardware were the same.

The idea with consoles, is that all games released for them for the next 5-10 years are optimised for that device, with low level hardware access etc. So for $399, that's all the hardware you need to buy for the next 5 years, and games will just look better and better without you having to buy a new graphics card. Best of both worlds is ideal (both have exclusives to some extent), but for me the consoles have won that value for money battle for a long time now, never mind the configuration headache (you're still often feeling that the framerate could be better, if you could just find the right shadow/AA combo setting, that wheel you have still needs to be configured for the right buttons in many games, etc.).

I'm set for both though for now. I have a PC that should be able to handle a good GPU. It cost me 850 euro in September and it only has a 1GB graphics card (550Ti) but I am very interested to see how things will pan out come the next-gen launches.

I will tell you this - the whole PhysX exclusivity bullshit alone hurts PC gaming, and I hope the next-gen console generation kills that bullshit.

 

[Neb]

Anyone factoring in games massive price difference in favour of PC ?
Because I usually buy a gaming machine for games... So if it costs a lot more to acquire games later on, it might very well cancel the cheaper "barrier of entry"...

And we can close this thread now. A matching PC wont be there for the same price at the beginning of this new gen but if you factor in the longterm costs it probably is. Console games costing more, you need subscriptions that costs to be able to do what you have for free on PC. Then price vs functionality the PC greatly exceeds.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I could still upgrade your PC for £400 and make it faster then consoles...

How do you upgrade my laptop?

 

[Neb]

In my experience even second hand console games in the shops around here are at best similarly priced and quite often still more expensive than the same PC game bought online (provided you wait until after the initial launch price drops to reasonable levels). I've been pretty suprised tbh at the still high price of second hand Wii games (I own a Wii) when I've looked in the past.

Here 10 new console games cost 1000USD. 10 new PC games cost 550-650USD (online/retail).

 

[almighty]

How do you upgrade my laptop?

Most decent laptops have CPU sockets with removable and upgradable parts.

 

[almighty]

Hers a post from a friend on a OC centric forum I use...

decided to make a budget build up, got sick of using a laptop.
price show what i paid for them inc postage.

not a bad build for £277.50

Case: Zalman HD501.. £6
CPU: i7 930.. £50
Ram: 6GB xms3 1600mhz.. £15
Ram: 6GB xms3 1600mhz.. £14
Cooler: H70.. £35
Mobo: Asus P6X58D-E Intel X58 £50
GPU: GTX 570 asus directcu II.. £80
PSU: OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W.. £27.50
Hard Drive: 500gb.. free

Ditch the GTX570 and add a £210 AMD HD 7950 bringing the total to £408

That's cheaper then Xbox One and only £60 more expensive then PS4.

You toss in some game purchases and PSN+ and Xbox Live for 12 months and that PC is cheaper while offering more features and more power.

 

[Arwin]

Where do they hand out free harddrives? Not that they are expensive ... Of course you don't need a BluRay drive (I watch those a lot, but don't need my PC to do it, as I already have PS3s), but then I wouldn't settle for less than a 1TB drive on PC.

The differences in game prices by the way aren't as big these days.

 

[liolio]

Theoretical of course, because I'm not sure that the PC version of a game will perform as well as a PS4 version of a game, even if all hardware were the same.

I think running "as well" is not really necessary, you have to be in the ball in perfs, you have various setting to play with, etc. As long as the game plays smooth enough, etc.
It is like the difference between the PS4 and Xb1 it may go from slightly visible to untrained eyes to picky to notice without magnifier and frame rate analysis,etc.
There was differnce between the ps360, there should be difference between the xb1 and the ps4, if there are difference between the former couple and "a console specced PC" it is not a deal breaker.

The idea with consoles, is that all games released for them for the next 5-10 years are optimized for that device, with low level hardware access etc. So for $399, that's all the hardware you need to buy for the next 5 years, and games will just look better and better without you having to buy a new graphics card. Best of both worlds is ideal (both have exclusives to some extent), but for me the consoles have won that value for money battle for a long time now, never mind the configuration headache (you're still often feeling that the framerate could be better, if you could just find the right shadow/AA combo setting, that wheel you have still needs to be configured for the right buttons in many games, etc.).

PC is a tad tricky, though there application profiles for those not willing to dig to hard by them-selves or setting available on the web. I guess it is something PC can't really overcome due to the cheer amount of GPU and CPU set-ups in the wild. As far as optimizing it will make much of a difference, the benefits of that gen of console is that there will be more and more properly threaded PC games. There are also new languages that does a really good job at maximizing the use of hardware, software environment on X86 is top notch. Wrt to CPU PC are quite faster it should make up easily for any difference.

I'm set for both though for now. I have a PC that should be able to handle a good GPU. It cost me 850 euro in September and it only has a 1GB graphics card (550Ti) but I am very interested to see how things will pan out come the next-gen launches.

The thing is as much as PC enthusiasts hate it or pretend not to see it, lots of PC gamers do not use high end gear, neither their update rate is not frenetic. That's is why I wonder about the impact of large cache on rendering, APU are to take over more and more of the PC market.
AMD no longer pushes "turk" part in the desktop realm (though they release the MARS line HD 8XXXm for portable), that segment is covered by APU. If cache or CW type of solution greatly aleviate the bandwidth constrains on APUs I would not be surprised if soon the HD x7xx line goes the way of dodo too.
At some point, consoles being consoles and having the impact they have on development, the benefit of UMA+APU even in the PC realm may eat away a significant part of the discrete part advantage.
CW is a poster child for what is the future of low and mid end (anything with a 128 bit bus and may be even 192 bit bus parts) => they are going the way of dodo and sooner than later.
In that context I think what would achieve Kaveri if it were to ship with a GDDR5 4GB conf is more relevant to the talk at end than whatever a CPU+ discrete GPU set-up can push be it now or later. Kaveri should launch during the same time windows as next gen, I hope AMD manages to give a proper follow up (excavator based, new GPU arch) Q4 calendar year 2014 on TSMC next generation process.

I will tell you this - the whole PhysX exclusivity bullshit alone hurts PC gaming, and I hope the next-gen console generation kills that bullshit.

Agreed.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Most decent laptops have CPU sockets with removable and upgradable parts.

Mine hasn't. No-one's I know has, people buying cheap laptops. Do laptops with Core2Duos and integrated graphics typically come room for decent GPUs expansions and replaceable CPUs needing completely different mobos? (any time you want to admit you cannot upgrade my PC and there's no way I can get a console-equivalent gaming PC for a few hundred quid by upgrading existing gear is fine by me... )

 

[almighty]

Mine hasn't. No-one's I know has, people buying cheap laptops. Do laptops with Core2Duos and integrated graphics typically come room for decent GPUs expansions and replaceable CPUs needing completely different mobos? (any time you want to admit you cannot upgrade my PC and there's no way I can get a console-equivalent gaming PC for a few hundred quid by upgrading existing gear is fine by me... )

See my post above.... I maybe not be able to do anything with your laptop but I can still build you a complete monster of a PC using second hand parts coupled with some games for the same price or cheaper then X1 or PS4

 

[pjbliverpool]

The differences in game prices by the way aren't as big these days.

I thought I'd check this out and I have to agree that console games seem to be much more reasonably priced at the moment compared to what I remember. That said, a quick look on Amazons latest releases over the last 90 days reveals that the first 6 games in the list would give a total saving of around £44 by buying on the PC compared to PS3 (which generally seems a bit cheaper in the Uk than the 360).

At 1 game purchase per month that would be enough to cover a new high end GPU after 4 years (which would be around the timescale when a high end GPU from today would start to fall out of driver/developer support).

Question is though, will the current trend of cheap consoles games continue through to the next generation?

 

[blakjedi]

See my post above.... I maybe not be able to do anything with your laptop but I can still build you a complete monster of a PC using second hand parts coupled with some games for the same price or cheaper then X1 or PS4

No blue ray
No Kinect
No HDMI in
No WiFi direct
No bluetooth

 

[warb]

Kinect is something unique now that it's fully integrated and bundled with system.

BD drives aren't too expensive.

 

[MrSpiggott]

Hers a post from a friend on a OC centric forum I use...



Ditch the GTX570 and add a £210 AMD HD 7950 bringing the total to £408

That's cheaper then Xbox One and only £60 more expensive then PS4.

You toss in some game purchases and PSN+ and Xbox Live for 12 months and that PC is cheaper while offering more features and more power.

I'm confused.
Are are saying that buying all these parts seperately, and paying a markup to all the different manufacturers and retailers, you can make a system more powerful and cheaper than either Sony or Microsoft?

That would make Sony and Microsoft woefully incompetent with their hardware designs to a staggering degree, wasting vast amounts of money.
Or the system you spec'd isn't as powerful as you think.

 

[Gubbi]

I'm not sure that's fair, noise is a very real concern for many PC gamers which is why most GPU reviews measure it. And quietness and performance are not mutually exclusive or necessarily costly.

I have a 7970 GE with a very good cooling solution. It is still *way* more noisy than my 360S under load, and XB1 will be a lot quiter by the looks of thing.

WAF for my PC in the livingroom is zero.

Power consumption and form factor are indeed often largely ignored

How about completely ignored. Almighty just claimed you'd save a wad of cash on not having XB Live/PSN+ while presenting a build that uses 200W more than PS4 and 250W more than XB1. You live in the UK, average price for a KWh is 0.15£, thats 55£ extra per year for electricity if you game four hours a day like most console gamers do.

but only because those just as often don't matter in the environments PC's are used in (well form factor anyway).

You're moving goal posts. The thread topic is how next gen consoles stack up to PCs, that includes price, performance, form factor, noise, ease of use and games.

When you consider all those things PCs are simply nowhere near.

Ease of use really only matters to people who aren't already PC gamers. If you're already a PC gamer then PC's are easy to use.

No it isn't and no they aren't, They've just grown used to the pain.

A three year old can start Dance Central with Kinect.

On PCs you're constantly fiddling with settings to get acceptable image quality/framerate. I upgraded my GPU to play Skyrim, disappointingly choppy the first 4 weeks until a driver update materialized, then it ran fine, except all text in books were gone (looked like a Z-offset error). Now, 9 months after I stopped playing Skyrim, it runs great. I'm fed up with that shit.

In my experience even second hand console games in the shops around here are at best similarly priced and quite often still more expensive than the same PC game bought online (provided you wait until after the initial launch price drops to reasonable levels). I've been pretty suprised tbh at the still high price of second hand Wii games (I own a Wii) when I've looked in the past.

Generally, six months old games are half price. Than you have Live Arcade / PSN with lots of deals.

PC's high ground is strategy games and MMOs, the latter will change with next gen.

Cheers

 

[pjbliverpool]

No blue ray
No Kinect
No HDMI in
No WiFi direct
No bluetooth

A bluetooth adapter is a little over £2 while a WiFi adapter is around £6 (Win8 has WiFi direct functionality built in) so if you really want those features on a desktop PC then they're pretty cheap to include. Blu-ray is cheap too although not the save level of cheap (around £25 for a drive).

HDMI in kinda falls into the catagory of a specialised service that you simply would have no use for on a desktop PC (similar how to a games consoles would have no use for a fully functional Windows OS plus Keyboard/Mouse).

Kinect though - that's a big value add for the X1. You can pick up the Kinect camera for the PC (version 1 now but version 2 will be available after the X1 launches) but it will cost around £160. You can argue there's very little point since there're no games that would use if but from a pure value perspective I guess it's valid to include it.

Of course the same could be said of (for example) Windows plus Open Office giving full workstation capability which the X1 can't match. Thus rather than stray into additional functions in which the two very different products are never going to match each other it may be best just to stick to the core gaming function which is where they overlap and to be fair, does seem to be the general topic of this thread.

 

[blakjedi]

Gubbi have you actively used consoles in the past or were you a PC guy.

 

[BRiT]

Of course the same could be said of (for example) Windows plus Open Office giving full workstation capability which the X1 can't match.

There's no technical reason why the Xbox One can't run MS Office directly on the App-OS portion of the system. Also on that matter, there's no reason it wouldn't be able to run any of the other web-related office products out there.

 

[blakjedi]

A bluetooth adapter is a little over £2 while a WiFi adapter is around £6 (Win8 has WiFi direct functionality built in) so if you really want those features on a desktop PC then they're pretty cheap to include. Blu-ray is cheap too although not the save level of cheap (around £25 for a drive).

HDMI in kinda falls into the catagory of a specialised service that you simply would have no use for on a desktop PC (similar how to a games consoles would have no use for a fully functional Windows OS plus Keyboard/Mouse).

Kinect though - that's a big value add for the X1. You can pick up the Kinect camera for the PC (version 1 now but version 2 will be available after the X1 launches) but it will cost around £160. You can argue there's very little point since there're no games that would use if but from a pure value perspective I guess it's valid to include it.

Of course the same could be said of (for example) Windows plus Open Office giving full workstation capability which the X1 can't match. Thus rather than stray into additional functions in which the two very different products are never going to match each other it may be best just to stick to the core gaming function which is where they overlap and to be fair, does seem to be the general topic of this thread.

I thought the thread was to outperform the x1 and ps4 as a package using PC parts. The things I mentioned are a part of the functionality and BOM for the X1. Now were saying we are just comparing silicon? Where's the equivalent sound card in the PC btw?

So the PC build is not looking good.

 

[rockaman]

Is this really a thread...

Can't we all just... you know... get along?