How is where you sit an indication of what kind of experience you get? I game at my desk, yes, but I dont have a office chair, I have a freaking lazy boy with a board across the armrests so I can use the M&K. Before you go on about my board, its wrapped in a blanket and I use a mouse pad. Very comfortable. IantheoneThe main benefit always cited around here is better graphics. If you're at a desk, 12-24 inches from a screen, super high resolution looks great. But if you are, let's say 8-10 feet from a 40-50" HDTV, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between 720 and 1080p, much less anything higher. Thus for people who prefer sitting on the couch playing with a controller on the big screen, the higher res argument is moot. Herms always refute the couch+controller+tv argument by saying "you can hook up your pc to a controller and tv!" but if the graphics don't look significantly better from that distance anyway, your pc is no better than a console... it just costs 2-3 times as much. In order to get the full benefit of a good pc's capabilities, you need to sit at a desk up close... which is an inferior experience, IMO.
ian give it rest the PS3 was still $500 in 2007, also depending on location and supply the PS3's were as much as $1000. and in 2007 I built a Pc for $750 and it walked all over both consoles which is a much better price to performance ratio... so only spend 25% more and get 3x the ability hmm thats a no brainer. That Pc still being used to this day playing modern games much better then either console version. Your arguments only work if someone had to build the top of the line Pc from scratch in 2006. Also you didnt need a top end Pc to beat the PS3 graphically, The PS3 only has 256mb system memory and 256mb of video memory which is only 25gb/s and the its Graphics chipset is a gimped Geforce 7800 which has more in common with a 7600 then 7800. From 2005 all the way into 2007(when multicore support started to take off) you could use a Single core cpu, have 1gb of memory, a Geforce 6 or 7 and match and or surpass what the console's did with multiplatform games. And a normal Geforce 7800GTX has 2x the video memory and 2x the memory bandwidth. In some countries console gaming is more expensive then Pc gaming. 04dcarraherBrand new PS3's started at $500 at launch in 2006, and were never sold at retail for $1000 (USD). If someone paid that much, it's because they were a sucker. What, can't find a PS3 in stores because you waited till the week before Christmas? Just wait till January. It's a few weeks. It won't kill you.
The reason I keep looking at 2006 prices for pcs and using high end machines that still meet the system reqs of games coming out in 2011, is because that's when the last consoles came out. If a new Xbox comes out in 2013, that means a 360 owner who bought his console in 2005 could go 8 years without having to upgrade and know his machine will play every single game released on the Xbox platform only having spent that initial $450. Well, I guess technically, he'd have had to buy a Kinect to play EVERY 360 game, and spend $400ish on Live, if he wanted online the whole time (thus why I went PS3 instead)... Ignoring Live, $600 on hardware for 8 years of meeting the System Reqs to play every game without worrying about whether he should buy a new card to get a little better graphics or anything like that.
Similarly, let's say PS4 comes out in 2014ish. $500-600 in 2006 to play every PS game for the next 8 years... including PS2 games, since we're talking about buying in 2006 (there were still PS2 games being released that didn't make it to next gen systems, or only to 360, for the first few years).
By comparison, you couldn't build a pc at all in 2005 that will still play all games released on the pc platform, much less play them well, without additional hardware investments since. And you couldn't build one in 2006 without spending a minimum of 2-3 times the cost of consoles. And even if you did that, you'd have had to replace your OS (which isn't cheap to do, legally...) at least once. I dunno, maybe more... any games with a hard requirement of Win7 yet? And hell, Win 8 will be here before 360/PS4.
Scalable hardware is nice... it can be an advantage. If you want better performance, you can upgrade, but you don't always have to just because the newest hardware is out. That's cool.... but it's also a disadvantage. Periodically, you do HAVE to upgrade, or lose the ability to play the newest and best games. Standard hardware, on the other hand, has the advantage of not having to worry about that. You buy a console at the start of the gen, you don't have to worry about it for 5+ years. In this gen, looks like it's going to wind up being 8+. You buy a PC at the start of the gen... and who knows. It might be only a year or two before a significant advancement comes along that becomes a requirement in new games. And further, while a pc may be hugely more powerful on paper, standard hardware allows for the code to be much more optimized. In practice, the differences are not nearly as vast as Herms like to claim, especially at the distance most console gamers sit from the screen.
You can't have the cake and eat it too. You wanna claim all those pc games on the spreadsheet, and better graphics/performance to boot? You have to accept much higher cost. You want to claim "not much more than consoles," you gotta accept that you can't play all the games on your platform, and even those you can, you have to sacrifice either performance or graphics to do it.
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