[QUOTE="subrosian"]
[QUOTE="aero250"]I agree console graphics are now up to par.Shafftehr
That was awesome... I laughed for two ~ three minutes straight. But then I had to stop because, since this is System Wars, and I realized you might not have intended that as a joke :|-
Console capability (not just graphics ) is so far behind the current PC high-end that I've become concerned that is MS / Sony don't release their next consoles before 2012, the genre divide will reach a point that has significant reprecussions for core gaming on consoles.
Truth be told, I agree with that statement. People bicker in forums about graphical differences which, when all is said and done, really aren't that great. I'm going to say it outright... The difference between Crysis and Gears is one that most people wouldn't even notice being all that great. The difference between DVD and Blu-Ray movies is one that a lot of people don't even realize is there until they've had it pointed out to them.
Video games aren't that different - we just happen to be in a setting where every minor discrepancy is studied and obsessed over ad nauseam. A game that looked great five years ago still looks great... People say "Oh, that makes my eyes bleed!" while just a few years back they were describing games that looked worse as "Wow, it's so incredible to look at!" In one generation, not that much changes. We just blow minor discrepancies out of proportion. Precisely like you've done here... Laughed for three minutes? If you actually did that, THAT would be funny.
Oh, and last note... The PC high-end is still defined by a game that's several years old. Yes, it looks better than any console game out there, but you know, not by that much. It is true that new consoles have to be released every five years or so so that the statement "console graphics are up to par" isn't a joke, but... They have been, so it isn't.The difference between Crysis Warhead on Enthusiast, and Gears of War 2 on the 360, is quite large. The same is true of the higher-quality Blu-Ray transfers against their older DVD counterparts. It's simply that we've reached a level of fidelity on the high end where I cannot properly show you what you're missing outside of a theater setting. This isn't about "more polygons" or "better textures" either - it's about the impact of playing, watching movies, or listening to music in my media room versus "oh, I'm playing videogames". Better source material goes a long way.
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The difference is startling - the difference is large enough that I get comments still from people who've experienced it multiple times. The other day on a screening of Pulp Fiction, we had to pause because my friend wanted to hear this conversation he thought was coming from the next room. He had no idea that it was two of the surrounds playing the background noises of the cafe patrons toward the end of the movie.
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We're reaching a point where we're simply playing the games, because the AI, interface, physics, graphics, etc are hitting a point of "reality" - and the closer we get, the greater the benefits become to enjoyment.
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I'm not a "typical PC gamer" - I could care less about a pixel count, or some argument over a "graphics king"... , it's well known that I'm platform agnostic - but anyone who wants to make the claim that a powerful PC "Doesn't have a point" is either ignorant or in denial. We're reaching a point where the 0.001% of people who have a high-end, silenced media center gaming PC in a theater setup are piece-by-piece going towards having a holodeck. And that's going to be a serious divide - when we have teh "let's play a game, it's fun" market on one end, and we have this enthusiast media-progressive market on the other building the singularity in their living room.
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And that still completely ignores the coming GPGPU revolution, integration into motherboads of massive numbers of cores, and the software that has already emerged towards such a design. If such things become available to a great number of consumers, the divide only becomes larger.
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An attack on the PC is built on the premise that consoles and PCs, in gaming, provide the same function, serve the same audience, and are ultimately concerned with entertainment. There's simply so much more to it - and so much more going on.
Thousands of mods, superior graphics, cheaper games, higher resolutions, better framerates, better loadtimes, etc... yeah 
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