Damn, console gamers hate us

[sandorski]

Are there any other hobbyist groups that are as insecure of their assumed superiority as PC gamers are?

I'm yet to find one.

You spelled "assured" wrong.

 

[Veliko]

That'll be a 'no' then.

 

[TheSlamma]

I've never had a period in my time that been building then the last 25 years I've really ever seen a console push a PC over performance, other than they are cheaper.

Exactly

Super Nintendo was 1990 and still only 16-bit, Intel IA-32 came out in 1985

SIMD was in X86 before the PS2

This latest generation of consoles they made a mistake on power out of the gate, the 8GB of RAM is decent but the GPU on both was not close to powerful enough to last as long as they will force these to go. 1080P @ 60fps should be a minimum.

 

[TheSlamma]

That'll be a 'no' then.

Why are you in this forum then?

 

[styrafoam]

When Bungie, Epic, Rockstar and the like shift their focus to IOS and android in the near future I think we will gain a strange kind of understanding in the gaming world. Games designed around a touchscreen being sloppily ported to an xbox controller and so on and so on.

 

[Fire&Blood]

PC gamers don't have hate for console gamers. Its pity. Its the weak hardware, overpriced games, and anti-consumer tactics we hate.

 

[ThinClient]

As a PC gamer, the only thing I don't like about many stereotypical console gamers is their ignorant arrogance about their console. The ones that have a superiority complex drive me up the wall.

 

[KentState]

As a gamer, I find anyone trying to prevent groups from enjoying a game a bit childish. I got to enjoy GTA V earlier this year and would love to see it on the PC.

 

[Pariah]

I've never had a period in my time that been building then the last 25 years I've really ever seen a console push a PC over performance, other than they are cheaper.

Go back 20 years. Probably don't have to go back that far, but to make the argument simple, there is absolutely no doubt that the original PlayStation was vastly superior in 3d graphics than any PC. At the time, PC 3d accelerators with affectionately know as 3d decelerators. It took 2 years for the PC to have anything competitive when the original Voodoo graphics boards were released.

3. There is still this outdated thought that you need a $3k pc that you have to upgrade every 6 months to be able to play games on a PC. Just not remotely true and hasn't been for years. This can partly be because consoles are now (and have been) holding back true innovation and boundary pushing. One impacts the other.

As with almost everything, this swings both ways. The belief among PC gaming elitists (not ALL PC gamers) that a current gen console is not able to compete with a $500 "gaming" PC is totally bogus as well. Yes, PC's at the highend are now much more powerful than consoles, but you are going to be spending some cash to hang in the highend. The average PC in use for gaming today is not as powerful as a PS4. Over 10 million PS4's have been sold so far. It is extremely unlikely there a 10 million PC's in use for gaming today that are as powerful.

It isn't consoles that are holding back PC gaming. It's the lack of a large enough market at the PC highend. The number of gamers running viable 4k gaming setups is probably in the thousands. According to steam, .02% of users have a 4k display. Drop to 1440p, and the number increases to just .96%. If you are a game developer, why would you target such a small market? There's no money there. The most common resolution is 1920x1080 which 1/3 of users have. The 2nd most common is 1366x768 at 26%. Which certainly furthers proof that the average gaming PC in use is not comparable to current generation consoles.

 

[Raduque]

The average PC in use for gaming today is not as powerful as a PS4. Over 10 million PS4's have been sold so far. It is extremely unlikely there a 10 million PC's in use for gaming today that are as powerful.

. According to steam, .02% of users have a 4k display. Drop to 1440p, and the number increases to just .96%. The most common resolution is 1920x1080 which 1/3 of users have. The 2nd most common is 1366x768 at 26%. Which certainly furthers proof that the average gaming PC in use is not comparable to current generation consoles.

But... but... PCGAMINGMASTERRACE!

 

[Aikouka]

As with almost everything, this swings both ways. The belief among PC gaming elitists (not ALL PC gamers) that a current gen console is not able to compete with a $500 "gaming" PC is totally bogus as well.

There's really no such thing as a "gaming PC" anymore. Now, I know some people will look at that cross-eyed, but I think people have the wrong idea. Gaming PCs were used a lot back in the late 90s and early 00s because of how bad processors were. Dual-core CPUs weren't prevalent until AMD brought out the Athlon 64 X2, which was rather expensive, and without one, all it took was a single background process firing off to bring your online game to a halt. I knew quite a few hardcore WoW players that had two PCs, and one was strictly for games as that's all it had on it.

I bring this up, because I think that people tend to ignore something about computers: they are general purpose machines. I don't purchase a computer just for gaming; I buy a decent machine so I can do everything else and gaming. I buy decent components so I can (hopefully) have a rock-solid experience in everything that I do (not just gaming).

The one thing that I do think people leave out of the pros of PC gaming is the better backwards compatibility. It isn't perfect by any means, but just try and fire up Max Payne on your latest console. The game was released on the first XBOX, but it still runs on the PC just fine... constipation face and all.

It isn't consoles that are holding back PC gaming. It's the lack of a large enough market at the PC highend. The number of gamers running viable 4k gaming setups is probably in the thousands. According to steam, .02% of users have a 4k display. Drop to 1440p, and the number increases to just .96%. If you are a game developer, why would you target such a small market? There's no money there. The most common resolution is 1920x1080 which 1/3 of users have. The 2nd most common is 1366x768 at 26%. Which certainly furthers proof that the average gaming PC in use is not comparable to current generation consoles.

Generating assets for 1080p doesn't really hold back 2560x1440/1600, and honestly, it isn't for 4K either. Why? The monitors aren't any larger. People are already using SSAA (i.e. render at 4K, resize to 1080p) as a method of reducing jagged edges. Rendering at 4K and displaying on the same size screen isn't really much different. The only difficulty is ensuring that things such as HUD elements are displayed correctly.

I would argue that I think the 30 FPS lock-in is a bigger problem that we've seen lately. It isn't just a developer being lazy in their port job. In some cases, they did it because it's inherent to the game's design (i.e. Need for Speed Rivals).

 

[Bateluer]

As with almost everything, this swings both ways. The belief among PC gaming elitists (not ALL PC gamers) that a current gen console is not able to compete with a $500 "gaming" PC is totally bogus as well. Yes, PC's at the highend are now much more powerful than consoles, but you are going to be spending some cash to hang in the highend. The average PC in use for gaming today is not as powerful as a PS4. Over 10 million PS4's have been sold so far. It is extremely unlikely there a 10 million PC's in use for gaming today that are as powerful.

Highly skewed there. 500 dollars can easily build you a machine thats more powerful than even the PS4; you can find a number of such builds over at PC Parts Picker. A 500 dollar gaming PC is not the average PC though. As you've already seen from the Steam Hardware Survey, the most common GPUs are integrated Intel IGPs, simply because those are commonly sold and there's plenty of casual games that run just fine on them. It would be more interesting if Steam's Hardware Survey let us drill down to see the specs of people playing specific games; ie, if we could see the numbers for people playing Skyrim or Wolfenstein New Order.

It isn't consoles that are holding back PC gaming. It's the lack of a large enough market at the PC highend. The number of gamers running viable 4k gaming setups is probably in the thousands. According to steam, .02% of users have a 4k display. Drop to 1440p, and the number increases to just .96%.

Again, skewed. UHD displays only become available a few months ago, and for a hefty price premium, a .02% share is unsurprising. See what that number is a year from now, when there's both more options for displays and more powerful GPUs available.

Even 1440p displays, though easily enough to get, never had mass market appeal. You either payed a hefty early adopter tax, bought one of the Korean B panels, or, if you waited for prices to drop, you say the 4K and/or 120/144hz displays on the horizon and benched 1440p entirely.

If you are a game developer, why would you target such a small market? There's no money there. The most common resolution is 1920x1080 which 1/3 of users have. The 2nd most common is 1366x768 at 26%. Which certainly furthers proof that the average gaming PC in use is not comparable to current generation consoles.

PC developers don't 'target' resolutions the same way console developers do. A console focused developer determines which resolution the available hardware can run their code on, and chooses, hopefully, the most ideal combination of resolution and frame rate for that hardware. On the PC side, its the player that makes that decision. A gamer can have a 1080p panel and choose to run the game at 720p simply because they'd rather have the higher frame rate than the improved fidelity. Or, like myself, can choose the higher resolutions and improved quality over frame rate.

Again though, the Steam survey shows all the numbers in one big pot. It doesn't differentiate between different games. Simply put, the 'market' for casual games will have different hardware than the 'market' for games like Inquisition or New Order. Those players looking to play the latest and greatest AAA releases will almost certainly have systems that exceed the Playstation 4, probably by a substantial margin.

 

[BrightCandle]

One way to read the steam survey is that about half of a 70 million steam user base is playing games at 1080p (higher than the consoles which seem to be settling on 900p@30) or above. That is 35 million HD or above players. That is more then double the combined total of the ps4 and xb1 combined. More interesting is that we know steam only represents 10% of the game capable machines out there. Sure many of those are well below modern standards but we can't ever call the PC market small, its frigging enormous as is the number of gamers using it. Far bigger than current console markets.

 

[ThinClient]

Go back 20 years. Probably don't have to go back that far, but to make the argument simple, there is absolutely no doubt that the original PlayStation was vastly superior in 3d graphics than any PC. At the time, PC 3d accelerators with affectionately know as 3d decelerators. It took 2 years for the PC to have anything competitive when the original Voodoo graphics boards were released.



As with almost everything, this swings both ways. The belief among PC gaming elitists (not ALL PC gamers) that a current gen console is not able to compete with a $500 "gaming" PC is totally bogus as well. Yes, PC's at the highend are now much more powerful than consoles, but you are going to be spending some cash to hang in the highend. The average PC in use for gaming today is not as powerful as a PS4. Over 10 million PS4's have been sold so far. It is extremely unlikely there a 10 million PC's in use for gaming today that are as powerful.

It isn't consoles that are holding back PC gaming. It's the lack of a large enough market at the PC highend. The number of gamers running viable 4k gaming setups is probably in the thousands. According to steam, .02% of users have a 4k display. Drop to 1440p, and the number increases to just .96%. If you are a game developer, why would you target such a small market? There's no money there. The most common resolution is 1920x1080 which 1/3 of users have. The 2nd most common is 1366x768 at 26%. Which certainly furthers proof that the average gaming PC in use is not comparable to current generation consoles.

Yeah, certainly doesn't have ANYTHING to do with monitor size AT ALL. :whiste:

What does resolution have to do with processing power to push those thousands and thousands of polygons and layer upon layer of rich texture?

My PC kicks the shyte out of a PS4 but I play 1920x1080 on my HDTV and console gamers who use these kinds of vapid arguments can kiss my master race arse.

 

[tidy]

.

 

[Bateluer]

PC users ought not to get too smug. PC gaming is resembling console gaming more and more by the year. And as for anti-consumer tactics, we're hardly immune. Before long we'll probably be renting every piece of software we install.

That said, if proper controls (ie. Mouse and Keyboard) was PC's only advantage, it would still be worth it.

True. We're getting higher prices, shorter games, and increasing amounts of IAPs and DRM as well.

 

[tidy]

.

 

[ImpulsE69]

Um...you realize most of what you pointed out above is what PC gamers gripe about the most right? thus the "consolization" of gaming.

 

[Annisman*]

So long as CDProjektRed are still around, the master race will endure.

 

[Bateluer]

Um...you realize most of what you pointed out above is what PC gamers gripe about the most right? thus the "consolization" of gaming.

I didn't have time to write a few pages worth of consolization content. Its been done before, repeatedly. Not much need to rehash it every thread.

 

[BSim500]

Go back 20 years. Probably don't have to go back that far, but to make the argument simple, there is absolutely no doubt that the original PlayStation was vastly superior in 3d graphics than any PC. At the time, PC 3d accelerators with affectionately know as 3d decelerators. It took 2 years for the PC to have anything competitive when the original Voodoo graphics boards were released.

Indeed that was the case 80's/90's re: 3D hardware acceleration. Today though, the days where consoles & PC's were radically architecturally different are over, and it seems everyone except console owners understands that "Next gen" x86 consoles are just low-end PC's themselves. They need games installed on their HDD's (as opposed to playing them 'live' off a DVD/BR/cartridge), then patches downloaded, etc, and their OS's are just variants of PC's Windows & FreeBSD with a 10-ft UI, all within a locked down proprietary environment. Some owners even spend another $500 on a 1TB SSD then take a screwdriver, open the case up and upgrade their 5,400rpm laptop HDD's (over $900 in total on their "console gaming rig"...)

Even the formerly proclaimed "direct to metal" console advantage is nowhere to be seen this gen. Eg, Watch Dogs is 792p/900p @ 30fps on consoles. Yet on PC's, the same 7850 (PS4) / 750Ti equivalent cards can average 40-50fps on Medium, and 30-40fps on High (i3-4130 + 750Ti) both at 1080p (which is 44% more pixels than the PS4 and 86% more than the XB1 at 30-50% higher frame-rates at equiv "Medium" quality settings). Same with the Thief reboot : Consoles = 900p/1080p @ 30fps. PC (i3-4330 + XB1 equiv 7790/260X) does 1080p @ 42-45fps on Normal/Med... So why isn't the PS4 doing 1080p/60fps (with +30% more power), and why isn't the XB1 doing 1080p/30fps given same GFX class of card"?

It's almost like the prior 20 year roles have been now completely reversed where not only are consoles no longer faster with same hardware, but they're actually somehow 30% slower vs "bloated, expensive" PC's fitted with same TFLOPS class GFX cards. A console not being able to beat a GTX 980 on Ultra at 4k is a given, but when it's 30% slower than a 7790 Bonaire at 720-1080p (even without Mantle) of which it's supposed to be the equivalent of - well, that's something else... Are devs not bothering with direct to metal coding due to cost (cheaper to just code everything in DirectX), or are the CPU's simply too weak to provide more than 30fps no matter what GFX cards are installed, making D2M GFX optimizations irrelevant (ie, as pointless as "low level coding" a GTX 980 if it's fed by a Celeron 1007U?) Pointing this out isn't "elitism", it's a serious & valid question of "what's gone wrong with consoles former efficiency advantage?".

As with almost everything, this swings both ways. The belief among PC gaming elitists (not ALL PC gamers) that a current gen console is not able to compete with a $500 "gaming" PC is totally bogus as well.

It isn't consoles that are holding back PC gaming. It's the lack of a large enough market at the PC highend. The number of gamers running viable 4k gaming setups is probably in the thousands.

Well it isn't bogus at all. See above figures. When a "PS4 equivalent" PC can do 1080p @ +40fps whilst a real PS4 can barely do 900p @ 30fps, then obviously even a PS4 can't compete with a $500 rig with a PS4 class GFX card, and yes, consoles are indeed holding things back (even without 4K resolutions or Ultra quality textures being a factor at all).

 

[Veliko]

"This gen" isn't even a year old yet so it's no real surprise that things aren't completely optimised yet; the development on these games would have started before they were first released and in some cases before the final specs were known.

 

[mmntech]

Go back 20 years. Probably don't have to go back that far, but to make the argument simple, there is absolutely no doubt that the original PlayStation was vastly superior in 3d graphics than any PC. At the time, PC 3d accelerators with affectionately know as 3d decelerators. It took 2 years for the PC to have anything competitive when the original Voodoo graphics boards were released.

As with almost everything, this swings both ways. The belief among PC gaming elitists (not ALL PC gamers) that a current gen console is not able to compete with a $500 "gaming" PC is totally bogus as well. Yes, PC's at the highend are now much more powerful than consoles, but you are going to be spending some cash to hang in the highend. The average PC in use for gaming today is not as powerful as a PS4. Over 10 million PS4's have been sold so far. It is extremely unlikely there a 10 million PC's in use for gaming today that are as powerful.

Nothing objectionable in this post. I think performance PC gamers like to think that there's more of us than there really are. The Steam Hardware survey shows otherwise. While there are 100 million active users now, I'd wager conservatively that maybe half are using gaming hardware. Of those, maybe 10% have systems that are more powerful than the PS4. It's still by and large a niche market due to the high cost of entry.

I was curious to see just how much it would cost to build a PC equivalent to an Xbox One. Based on benchmarks of the desktop Kabini chips, I'm going to say the CPU is roughly equal to an older A6 in performance. So we'll pick the 5600K for our build.

The console also uses DDR3 2133 memory, so we need a mobo that supports that. Our cheapest one that comes with HDMI and the proper number of USB 3.0 ports is the MSI A78M-E45. For memory, the Team Vulcan was cheapest but I went with Muskin because apparently the former has issues running at its advertised speed.

Closest GPU to its 1.31 TFLOPs performance is the Radeon 7770 Ghz Edition, which can be easily overclocked to match it.

I went with the exact same HDD but a slightly faster BD Drive. Newegg didn't have Liteon drives, which the Xbone uses. For the case, I went with the cheapest desktop style HTPC case with a power supply. That's the Aptiva X-Master.

CPU: AMD A6-5600K $59.99
Motherboard: MSI A78M-E45 $64.99
Memory: Muskin 8GB (2x 4GB) DDR3 2133 $76.99
GPU: MSI Radeon HD 7770 Ghz Edition $99.99
HDD : Seagate Momentus 500GB 5400rpm 8mb cache $58.88
Optical: LG 12x Bluray drive $39.99
Case: Aptiva X-Master Back with 500w PSU $69.99
OS: Windows 8.1 64-bit OEM $99.99

Total $570.81

It's an extra $150 if you want Kinect for Windows.

I looked at some pre-built models and they aren't much cheaper. You could save $100 using Steam OS but there's still not a lot of content over on Linux right now. Console makers have the advantage of wholesale prices. Plus AMD isn't making consumer CPUs with that kind of GPU on die. Simple fact of the matter is that consoles are and will probably always be cheaper than a comparable gaming PC. Plus most gamers aren't hobbyists. They want a simple, pick up and play system, and can't be bothered with tweaking, overclocking, or modding.

Bare in mind though that this will change. The one weakness of consoles if they're static in terms of hardware. They can't be upgraded. So in a year or two, it will be cheaper to build a more powerful PC. This is the state of things right now.

 

[Pariah]

Well it isn't bogus at all. See above figures. When a "PS4 equivalent" PC can do 1080p @ +40fps whilst a real PS4 can barely do 900p @ 30fps, then obviously even a PS4 can't compete with a $500 rig with a PS4 class GFX card, and yes, consoles are indeed holding things back (even without 4K resolutions or Ultra quality textures being a factor at all).

I never said anything about hardware equivalency. I said performance equivalency for the same price. The cheapest 7850 on newegg is $130. Good luck building the $500 PC I stated with a card that expensive. Ignoring of course, that a PS4 only costs $400. mmntech above me just posted a $570 PC with a slower 7770 and no input devices. Sony gets volume discounts by buying their parts in the millions, and then still sells the hardware at a loss initially. There is no way you're going to build an equivalently performing PC for the same price that Sony is selling a PS4 nor within $100.

Generating assets for 1080p doesn't really hold back 2560x1440/1600, and honestly, it isn't for 4K either. Why? The monitors aren't any larger.

Obviously the larger a display, the more it benefits from a higher resolution. In reverse, there comes a point as you go down in size that you don't want to exceed a certain resolution unless you have Ted Williams vision. There is no single size monitor that is optimized for 4k and 1080p resolutions. Anything 30" or under is too small for 4k, and anything over about 24" is too big for 1080p on a desk. The 25-30" range is optimal for 1440p/1600p displays.

People are already using SSAA (i.e. render at 4K, resize to 1080p) as a method of reducing jagged edges. Rendering at 4K and displaying on the same size screen isn't really much different. The only difficulty is ensuring that things such as HUD elements are displayed correctly.

You'd have saved yourself some typing if you had just said, I don't own a 4k display.

Highly skewed there. 500 dollars can easily build you a machine thats more powerful than even the PS4; you can find a number of such builds over at PC Parts Picker.

See above, no you can't.

PC developers don't 'target' resolutions the same way console developers do. A console focused developer determines which resolution the available hardware can run their code on, and chooses, hopefully, the most ideal combination of resolution and frame rate for that hardware. On the PC side, its the player that makes that decision. A gamer can have a 1080p panel and choose to run the game at 720p simply because they'd rather have the higher frame rate than the improved fidelity. Or, like myself, can choose the higher resolutions and improved quality over frame rate.

You have to be kidding if you think PC developers don't have performance targets in mind throughout the whole development process for common base configurations (minimum/recommended configurations) at common resolutions.

 

[Red Storm]

For some reason there's this assumption that if you're not a PC gamer, you wouldn't have a computer at all. Simply not true, you just wouldn't have a beefy video card. To me, the true cost of PC gaming is in the video cards, not the entire computer. The same way I don't consider the big screen TV as part of the console gaming cost.