Originally posted by: wickedone
I am begining to feel that the  XBOX and Playstaion will start taking over, I belived the PC was  the best platform for it a year ago  but for the  following reasons it may change.
Hitting a barrier on  CPU speeds, result may be  going to duel  CPU mother boards and start having more applications take advantage of multiple CPU's, so  now the  cost has doubled.
		
		
	 
No...dual-core and better HT. Cost and everything else increases as normal, just that it's getting to a point where using multiple slower cores is easier than making a single one really fast.
	
	
		
		
			Video Cards- use to be you were safe not buying the high end card , now programers seems to be taking advantage of the new cards  and also talking about duel Video cards. Cost  has  gone to $450+  or  double.
		
		
	 
It's dual.
Anyway, that's BS. If you paid $300 for a Ti 4600, you're still fine. It's no worse than when you got a Voodoo2 and needed a new card about when the GF DDR was hitting the streets, and could hold out a bit even then.
	
	
		
		
			Dule channel Ram has already been in use for some time  but it seems every  windows operating system needs much more that  the last..
		
		
	 
That's capacity, not speed. Give XP 256MB RAM and a PII 266 will run OK. speed and bandwidth is for the applications that are getting hungry. And check overclocking benches...overclocking the RAM makes very little difference outside of content creation. DDR is getting faster and around when we get to needing more than 6.4GB/s, DDR-II should be there. Note that Samsung has already gotten 800MHz modules. Them and Micron are basically waiting for the market to want the technology. Around 800MHz, DDR-II becomes clearly superior to current DDR (not touching XDR with a 10' pole).
	
	
		
		
			Now from what I have read the new xbox and PS3 will have  ( 3 CPU's ). I believe it will have  current  ATI  GPU for Xbox  not  sure about the  PS3. Take that  with no operating system running in the back ground and  games  wrote to  make  use of the 3 CPUs  it  will take a lot of  cash to  get  something  that  runs  games much better. They also seem to sell the  platforms  for  little money  with the hopes  of making  money off the games.
		
		
	 
And how will PCs be by then? For one thing, speed isn't everything--just take a look at multitasking and gaming benches for the A64 2800...a 1.8GHz CPU, with about the same calculation ability as the TBreds that got that high is at worse even with the 2.2Ghz XP. We might not be but into 4GHz Intel and 3GHz AMD next year, but they will haul some serious ass.
	
	
		
		
			Bottom  line  I could  be wrong  but  looks  like  where  most  hardcore  gamers  spent  money  building  high end  systems to run  current  and upcoming games the future  may not be good, with out  spending  $3000k or more compared to  ( just a guess ) $500 for a  new XBOX  or PS3.
		
		
	 
...or at most $1000, but me using 2nd-hand monitors, more like $700, and getting cheaper. True high-end is always wasted money (except on monitors). $3000 would make a nice dually, but no way a single-CPU desktop.
Consoles have one thing going for them:
Fighting games.
PCs can do any kind of sim, FPS and strategy game like no console will be able to until they output similar res ($100 monitor, or $2000 TV?), have a mouse and keyboard, and do real 60+ FPS.
PC gaming has dropped off a bit recently, but you know why? Piss poor games. The last really good games were Mafia and MW4. Nothing since has been that great. Sure there's been eye candy, but that's really all. Hopefully in a year or so some good ones will pop out (Doom 3, HL2, maybe a few good RTSs).