Rajat Taneja, EA’s chief technology (?) officer recently made the somewhat bizarre claim that the next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft are “a generation ahead” of the highest-end PC. Seems we weren’t the only ones to pick on this episode of foot-in-mouth, with Epic CEO Mark Rein emphatically pulling Taneja up on Twitter.
Here’s the original statement from Taneja, published in an interview on Develop:
“These architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market and their unique design of the hardware, the underlying operating system and the live service layer create one of the most compelling platforms to reimagine game mechanics. Our benchmarks on just the video and audio performance are 8-10 times superior to the current gen.”
And here is Rein’s response:
RT @developonline: EA: Xbox One and PS4 a generation ahead of PC http://t.co/IL9BSBAM23 <-no they’re not. I call bullshit on this one.
— Mark Rein (@MarkRein) May 23, 2013
Yep, I’d call bullshit too. While the Xbox One and the PS4 might have something on the average gamer’s machine, with a decent budget you could put together a PC that would put these consoles and their specifications to shame. Heck, right now I’m sure there are some out there with healthy disposable incomes running 16GB or more and GPUs in SLI / CrossFire.
While I’m completely disinterested in consoles, I can see the appeal if all you want to do is game and after seeing prominent figures of the gaming media struggle to install video card drivers, the point becomes even clearer: PCs require work, consoles don’t.
But the lines between PC and console hardware a more blurred than ever, with greater emphasis on media centre functionality and the homogenisation of hardware. At one point you could say consoles were innovating with proprietary hardware — we all remember the likes of the Emotion Engine, or the obsession with ever-increasing bits.
That doesn’t seem to be the case now, with both vendors going with off-the-shelf parts. Sony probably got burnt on the expensive cul-de-sac that was Cell and it’s in Microsoft’s best interests to align with Wintel, so there’s certainly strong business cases to be made by both parties.
Still, I remember the excitement I felt seeing the PS2 tech demo… that seems a long, long time ago.
@MarkRein [Twitter]
Comments
78 responses to “Xbox One And PS4 Ahead Of High-End PCs? Epic CEO Calls Bullshit”
I love you Mark Rein 😀 No doubt Taneja will come back with some bullshit like ‘Oh I meant the average pc’ which is just pure shit.
Most PC games though are designed to run on the average PC.
At a medium to low end ability. To get the optimal performance you usually have to have a decent machine. Taneja isn’t saying they’re average, he’s saying they’re above and beyond so you don’t measure them against average, you measure them against the top of the line.
Actually most game engines only use 2-4gb of memory due to the fact that 50% of gaming PC’s only have 4gb, which means they have more like 3gb available for games. On top f that, the reason engines only support dual and quad cores is because f the fact that, once again, 50% of gaming rigs still have dual and quad cores. You see. Yes. high end PC’s are amazing, they always have been and always will be. The problem is that MOST gamers do not have the $$ to throw at a PC like that, or to keep upgrading their PC’s… And for guys like that… Consoles will always be a good deal, because they wont be as powerful as the highest end PC’s, but they are a hell of alot better than the average gaming PC.
They used 2 – 4 gb while most OS’s were bound to 32bit architecture, however as more 64bit architecture becomes common place you’re going to find more and more games taking advantage of up to 8gb ram (BF3 for instance). So, while PC’s are coming out of the 32 bit architecture and were held there longer by this previous cycle of consoles, that was true but you’ll find with the newer games coming out, it isn’t any more.
Yeah, I agree with that, but still. it seems that most gamers have this idea that everyone has these high powered gaming rigs, when the fact is… They don’t…
Facts say a large number of gamers still run Windows XP. So most developers are still making games that run on DirectX 9. PC gaming as a whole is far from reaching its potential.
The only reason I stopped using XP is because the install died. Windows 8 is sort of an improvement in some ways but so much faster in more important areas.
Tbh I didnt like 8 when I initially installed it, but I’ve come to quite love it since. It’s fast as **ck with an SSD (6 second bootup :O faster than win7!?) and smooth as butter to use. Its smoother than Windows 7 for me, but the only thing I don’t like is the ‘metro’ interface. Once I downloaded a start menu app, it was gold 🙂
@weresmurf Even on old school HDD’s its super fast. And windows is ready to use on boot. Not ready to spend minutes loading programs.
I can’t reply to you BTW.
Yeah once you go like 5 levels down it stops allowing you to reply… WE’RE DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE MAN!!!!!
I’ve noticed it doesn’t sit there idling while it loads programs up in the background like all previous versions of windows, I think most of the negativity (from me included) came from the fact it was just very different. However after fiddling around with it for ages, I’m HAPPY to say I was completely wrong and am thoroughly enjoying it since 🙂
Indeed however that has a definite deadline. MS is ending all support for WinXP on April 8th, 2014, when that happens, they’ll move well away from DX9 and into DX10/11 on a larger scale, why? Because it’s time. DX9 has served well for a long time, but you don’t keep a workhorse in the paddock when it’s old, grey and past its prime when there’s younger, fitter horses to do the work.
It’s inevitable things will move ahead into better areas, more advanced areas, we’ve moved from the pixellated, 2d graphics of the early 90s to advanced 3d graphics in the late 90s early 2000s, to incredible 3d graphics of modern day, it’s moved from DX1 to 9 to 10 to 11 and the simple fact is, it will eventually move past 9 being the base level (and that’s all it is now, is a severely base level).
People will still go on using Windows XP, but that number will drop. Currently 45% of all known computers use WinXP, however that also includes businesses so one cannot actually say for sure what number of gamers that definitely is. 32% of users currently use Windows 7 and the rest use various other ones, whatever percentage use Vista, deserve to be shot 🙂
The number of XP users is dropping as PC’s get replaced, become cheaper etc, the number of Win7 users is rising as is Win8 apparently (given MS seems to have killed off anyones ability to sell 7 :\ )
Gamers, proper gamers who want the best benefits, will not stick with Windows XP for long at this point, they won’t be able to run DX11 for instance and there are more games coming out now that give added benefits of using DX11 rather than 9, or certain games that require a base level of WIndows Vista/7.
Mostly because of cross-platform releases requiring the game in question being made to the “Lowest Common Denominator” as it were.
In other words, Consoles are holding the PC market back.
To be fair even PC exclusives try and run on the oldest machine possible. They always have because it’s bad business to only sell to people who have brought a new, high power computer within the last two years.
“In other words, Consoles are holding the PC market back.”
No, developers aiming at 32-bit PCs (such as those still using possbily Pentium 4 machines) are what holding the PC market back.
Considering that consoles are a completely different architecture (which gives the advantage of needing less hardware for same performance on PC but the disadvantage of non-customisation) the claim that consoles hold back the PC gaming is a mere fallacy and is in the same league as second hand games killing the gaming industry.
Part of that reason was the console market. It’s not the singular reason why but it’s part of it. There was this timeline I saw a while back that showed the progress of the PC in the last 20 years on a graph, it goes up up up up up then in the last 7 or so years staaaaaagnates and barely goes anywhere lol. I don’t BLAME consoles for that though, I blame the devs who were content to sit on there arses and be content with what they had rather than pushing boundaries more and more.
doesn’t stagnate, more like a change or priorities. Less focus has been on raw clock speed and more on power management. i’m sure they could push clock speeds and threads to crazy lengths if they wanted but it would cost a small car in terms of wattage used.
In that period of time, mostly cross platform conversions came out, ports etc were focused on. So not much was pushed on the computer. The occasional game came out that did but not as much as previous times.
What @weresmurf said. We’ve had shithouse ports for years now, developers refusing to develop for the hardware that’s out there because they wanted to make the consoles their priority. Because apparently that’s where the money is. It doesn’t help that as soon as they toss in what SHOULD be bare minimum features like a high-res texture pack and the option to turn on vsync, various games media started tonguing the dev’s assholes, praising them for being PC-friendly.
If we weren’t beholden to the consoles, we wouldn’t be seeing so much in the way of disappearing corpses/decals, in-game save points, limited number of saves, no option to rename saves, quick-time events that barely bother to change the key displayed from their original 360 pad colour-coding, terrible control-mapping/conversion from game-pad (mouse-smoothing/mouse-lag – go play Deadspace on the PC for the most egregious example of someone doing a port without knowing that a mouse doesn’t behave like an analogue stick), lack of advanced graphics options, pathetic draw-distances, and many other optimization short-cuts. My personal favourite: “This icon indicates that the game is saving. Please do not turn off your… uh… PC, while it is displayed.”
And they will continue to be made for the lowest common denominator. The Xbox One. Ill still get one and a ps4. The rig will also sit next to the tv. I know I’m weird.
Bullshit, PC gamers are holding PC market back
There is no room for confusion when he says “a generation ahead of the highest end PC”
He is clearly not talking about the average.
Exactly.
By that logic, PC games should not offer high resolution options and max modes of shaders, lightning, mapping and anti-aliasing, since the ‘average’ PC cannot run these, hence no reason to include it in the development.
PC games, by definition are designed to scale with the hardware present, and they also require specific hardware to run in an optimal fashion (ie at a resolution, that makes maximum use of texturing capabilities etc. So “designed to run” means by definition the kind of hardware, that maxes out the games inherent capabilities. Everything below basically chops the game down for the system to still be able and run it.
What the average PC looks like, that runs the majority of games bought, is a very different question. Obfuscating that with technological capabilities and limitations, as Taneja does (for an obvious reason), is simply dumb and deserves to be called out as such.
The way things are going with the disappointing xbox one and my lack of interest in the PS4 I can think I just save up and upgrade my pc would be cheaper as i only want a newer graphics card
Indeed, a PC upgrade should be much cheaper. The Jaguar-based CPUs in the new consoles won’t be exceptionally powerful; any mid to high range PC CPU from the last few years should be able to outperform them handsomely. However, anyone still rocking a dual-core should consider stepping up to a quad-core, since the new consoles should push game development towards superior multithreading.
The PS4’s GPU will be roughly equivalent to a modestly overclocked Radeon HD 7850 – factory overclocked models can be had today for about $200. The Xbone’s GPU will be closer to a 7770, which one can buy today for as little as $110.
For a little more cash, a 7950 (from $290) has more than double the raw power of the Xbone’s GPU and about two-thirds more than the PS4.
This is the danger of social networking. What makes him need to voice his disagreement about someone eases opinion, in such a disrespectful and public way? Makes no sense to me.
What makes you need to voice your disagreement about someone eases opinion, in such a disrespectful and public way? Makes no sense to me.
It’s not his disagreement about someone else’s opinion, it’s his disagreement to a blatant lie. As for why Twitter was the medium, I’d say it was a matter of convenience.
Link the story, outline your disagreement, thousands of subscribers see it and pass it on. What medium would be better?
The danger of social networks is people calling out lies in something that is being spread as fact to promote sales?
Love it when someone hits the nail on the head, exactly this ^
because they are both in the same industry and it’s in his best interest to not let someone else bullshit his audience into buying a different product, seriously, if someone was outright bullshitting your user base in an attempt to get them to think their platform was the superior one you’d want to call them out to.
that’s the danger of people like you who thinks an opinion overrides facts, in this case the guy was talking out his ass and someone called him out, this is one of the better parts of social media, the fact that you can so easily be called out on your own bullshit.
the real danger is that people can bullshit like that in the first place and have people like you thinks that makes the sun shine out their ass for having an opinion and lying to you.
lol why does this not surprise me that you of all people dont like others correcting false or misleading statements? I guess for you its alright for people to pass BS as ‘facts’ and no one can say otherwise. Go figure.
Well the guy was putting out a 100% miss truth.
there would be ppl that believe him when he says that.
he called him out quite rightly because if it is ignorance or a blatant lie is irrelevant. Its just not true.
Some would even base their console purchase on remarks from ppl like this. So yes it is very important to call them out imho.
I’m playing the devil’s advocate here, but the original quote was “these architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market”. How many highest end PCs have the SoC architecture? All the PCs I know have the CPU and the GPU totally separate.
That’s not necessarily an advantage. Separate CPU and GPU means separate cooling systems, which means that each can work harder (and thus produce more heat) than they could if they were stuck together in a SoC and sharing a single cooler. Accessing the memory through a single controller shared by the CPU and GPU brings bandwidth benefits to the CPU, but it’s questionable how well the Jaguar-based CPUs in the new consoles will actually be able to take advantage of any of that extra bandwidth.
MS and Sony went with a SoC design because they can have a single chip and a single cooler, leading to lower space, power and noise requirements, which is what you want for a box sitting under the TV in the living room as opposed to a tower case under a desk. It’s nothing to do with performance advantages.
But his statement doesn’t say anything about performance. He just says it is a generation ahead. Isn’t the SoC architecture generation ahead of the split CPU and GPU architecture? As in, SoC came after?
That would be a pretty selective reading of what Taneja actually said, given that either side of the quotation included above, he’s talking about the step up in graphics and compute power that the new consoles will offer.
Not really. He is comparing architecture with the PC. He is comparing the graphics and computer power to the current gen consoles. A lot of people are taking his statement totally out of context. People are coming in with a negative view, even before they read his statement.
Go and read Taneja’s original post at Linkedin. The paragraph from which this quote is drawn opens with: “It all begins with the raw horsepower of the platform which catalyzes the imagination and will power the next wave of innovation in entertainment.” (The bolding is in the original text.) It’s abundantly clear from the context what the intended meaning is.
I am not so sure re. cooling. A unified architecture removes potential bottlenecks first and foremost and if this advantage is being used properly, it will of course outperform a spec-wise similar solution with separate parts. Now how that SOC-solution is shaped to allow optimal cooling is a different aspect, that can definitely be addressed. That single cooler will simply look a bit different compared to a more traditional design (which by itself has made a remarkable evolution to accommodate heat output on modern systems).
I agree, that those consoles will likely not properly exploit the advantages, at least not for the first couple of years. The same seems to be true for current gen. I mean the Cells potential has never been used properly due to its demanding programming and looking at GTA V or GT6 (IF their representations are accurate) it goes to show, how powerful even seemingly ancient tech can be, if properly used. In the end the PC, whether in its current shape or adopting a similar design to next-gen consoles (which is inevitable and already in progress) will likely always outperform consoles on account of brute force and much shorter tech cycles, not when it comes to revolutionary changes, but in regard to address hardware issues via evolution. Since next gen consoles now resemble PC tech even closer than before, the performance-advantage has further shifted towards PC (which is what the CryTek guy was alluding to a few weeks back).
My point is that performance, power consumption and case configuration (size, cooling ability etc) are all connected, and you can’t change one without impacting the other. Consoles can only get so physically big before they start to annoy the market (think original Xbox), so whatever upper constraints MS and Sony chose would have limited how large their cases could get, which would have in turn dictated how much cooling capacity they could install, which would in turn put a cap on the total power draw (and thus the performance) of their system. Going with a SoC configuration makes it easy to stay within these boundaries because there’s only one cooler to deal with. That’s the most efficient way to stay inside the target.
This is the opposite direction to take as opposed to someone who is trying to maximise performance. In that case it’s desirable to have separate chips because you can spread the cooling work over multiple coolers. Having multiple coolers is not an efficient way to do a small amount of cooling, but it is to do a large amount of cooling.
Of course these are the extremes. PCs are designed to be big and electricity-hungry, but within reason. Consoles obviously have performance goals to meet also. But the key point is that choosing between a SoC arrangement and discrete chips, at least at this point in time (on current fab processes), is informed by whether you’re primarily targeting a power/size goal or a performance goal.
He implies technological superiority tied to performance in games (which is of course what gamers are ultimately interested in), where no such thing exists (he specifically mentions “computing and graphics power”). In the best of cases he highlights different engineering solutions, and SoC is all the rage primarily for cost-effective production, power consumption and compact design. It does have some performance advantages too, but not to the degree, that the XBox One or PS4 would outperform a Gaming PC. Basically by his definition a Prius is much more powerful than a Nissan GT-R, because of its more innovative tech and higher efficiency.
PCs will follow the SoC-approach in future iterations too, but that does not at all mean, that currently available systems are not able to put the NextGen-consoles to shame in terms of raw performance and capabilities (and keep in mind, that the PC hardware wars have generally slowed down precisely because consoles with their ancient tech have taken over the consumer market).
Because the consumer market “thinks” it wants/needs ease of use. “i” products etc…
I have no hassle with “ease of use”. Of course what the “market wants” (rather what some corporations think, it wants) is dummy technology, that emphasizes “ease of use” to such a point, that it actually severely hinders technological capabilities and locking users out of making basic decisions about their hardware, in turn for giving companies maximum profit margins (see mobile OS UI’s for example). On that point, I have used PCs for play and work for an odd twenty years now, and I find that we have come to a point, where its super-easy to use a PC, update software etc. I remember a time, when a driver had to be put on file by file, when users had to select IRQs individually etc. So yeah…PCs are actually very user-friendly nowadays.
I have a console myself (only a PS2, though I will pick up a PS3, when prices have fallen further and GT6 and GTA V are out), I can appreciate the good points about it.
Im not disagreeing with you paraoz58, just pointing it out that we did it to ourselves and continue to allow them to market and push us that way.
If you want to put it like that, then by his definition, a prius is a generation ahead of a gtr. Nowhere in that little quote does it say more powerful, except for where is referencing the current gen consoles.
He jumps back and forth between current consoles and PC, performance and hardware design as yardsticks for his promotion of the XBox One, all within three sentences and one paragraph. He is, either due to lack of knowledge, or intentionally mixing up different issues, throwing them together into one mash. Say what you like, but that is obfuscation. Why else is he specifically mentioning the “highest end PC on the market”? All PCs follow precisely the same hardware design. He could have just as well picked “PC” (perhaps specifically naming the issue, ie SOC/unified architecture), but that would not have made such a rhetorically powerful, yet technically meaningless point (when it comes to both performance and quality as end results). His remark about game mechanics is even worse, since its primarily consoles, that held back the transition to 64-bit gaming due to porting issues, which is the primary innovation, thats going to come out of this development.
I dunno, I mean obviously on a hardware level it’s utter bs, but there’s a lot of tweaks you can do on a dedicated gaming console that a standard PC (without user-optimizations) won’t have. I guess that’s what the guy meant, in a lie-y sort of way
That’s probably what he was trying to say in an out-right mis-truth.
The fact that people haven’t worked this out already absolutely baffles me.
The only way it could possibly come out ahead of PCs is if optimisation is good enough that it can make do with less power for higher graphics with what it has, but that means that it will only really be ahead for a year or two. Hardware will increase in power enough for it to not matter.
I imagine he’s just talking about how all the components fit together, utilisation of cores etc. Obviously if he’s talking about the speed of the hardware itself he needs a big kick in the jugular. There’s no way either the Xbox One or PS4 are going to give my GTX690 gaming PC a run for its money.
ultimately the graphics power of consoles is irrelevant, even if they were ahead of PCs at some point they get taken over far to quickly for it to matter.
My gaming machine is two years old. It’s better than the next gen consoles…
I’m 31 years old and I’m better than your 2 year old PC.
Next gen consoles with their DDR5 memory, 32MB of high speed ESRAM and highly optimised architectures would probably disagree with you. My MacBook Pro is 4 years old, it has 4GB of memory and a 512MB GeForce BLAH BLAH graphics card. My Xbox 360 is 8 years old and has 1GB of memory. It out performs my MacBook Pro.
has anyone at EA or Microsoft ever actually spent more than 10 minutes at a time playing a video game? why the hell are these people in industries they don’t give a shit about? wait…
Agreed.
Lol there are so many things wrong with that tweet, not sure if troll
I still call bullshit as well but
Lets go out on a limb here and give the statement the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was comparing Jaguars with Kias, sure your new Kia whatever might be an advancement in technology compared to the previous generation Jaguar, but lets not kid ourselves, it is still a Kia and people would much rather be seen in a last gen Jag even if your competition has some fancy self parking tech.
While it’s absolutely true that the statement was crap, a high-end current gaming machine would be miles ahead in raw power, that’s really only half the story. PC games are written to use abstraction layers due to all the crazy combinations of hardware you can have. There’s so many things in the way between the bare hardware and the game. In comparison, with a console you know exactly the configuration, and can code games with exact specs in mind. Generally you can get much closer to the hardware as well. So while the specs of the systems don’t look amazing, developers should be able to do much, much more with the hardware than they could an equivalent-spec PC. Also the fact these consoles are using fairly standard PC hardware should mean the ramp-up time is much quicker. Previous hardware generations, console stuff has taken a year or two to really hit its stride, because there’s a lot of time investment involved in learning the specifics and quirks. That shouldn’t be as much of an issue this time.
So basically, if you were to claim that the consoles should be able to put out stuff that’s on par with current high-end PCs, that’s probably not that much of a stretch. PCs will always have an edge, but you’d probably need to dump about six to eight times the money into one compared to a console. That’s always been the value proposition for PCs. You can build a couple-hundred-dollar PC now that will perform on par or slightly better than current consoles, but it’s taken over half a decade to get to that sort of price-to-performance parity.
“PC games are written to use abstraction layers due to all the crazy combinations of hardware you can have. There’s so many things in the way between the bare hardware and the game. In comparison, with a console you know exactly the configuration, and can code games with exact specs in mind. Generally you can get much closer to the hardware as well. ”
+1. This is what most people over look. PCs are at a disadvantage as they have numerous layers of abstraction and somewhere effort has to be made to hide the differences of hardware configurations.
Thus while PCs do have more raw hardware, there is no specialisation so there are overheads. Consoles are a known (frankly, mapped out) hardware platform and often have buses and chips solely for the purpose of gaming.
Thus, it is possible for some console ports to perform better than PCs because the hardware is known and (if the publisher let’s the developer spend the time) the developer can look at the hardware and say “wow! This bus isn’t used but goes to the chip we want so let’s stream through that and see what happens!”
For example, Half-Life 2 had very bad load times when it first came out. But when it got ported to the original XBox, the developers found a way to use streaming to keep load times low on the console and ported it back to the PC.
So to those who say the consoles hold back PCs, think again.
The main thing was that even low end PC parts have supported Direct X 11 for like 4 years, consoles have kept us on DX9 for that time.
Its more of a feature thing than a power thing.
There is also only so much to be gained by having small overheads when you still have such a tiny amount of ram. It really limited level sizes this gen.
Also, just to clarify, I agree with everything you said I just believe that it is possible for consoles to hold back PCs in certain ways.
OMG a console guy said consoles were the best, just like they said last gen. Well Duh.
Here is a tip they will say it again with the next cycle of consoles, I mean you’re not going to shift many units telling the truth. “This is the xbone, it’s slightly less powerfull than the average gaming PC”
Lol
I’m surprised those claims were made to start with. I would have thought anyone with at least a basic knowledge of computer hardware would know that was completely untrue. What did they do, test their figures against a 2 year old computer? It’s a bit silly.
OK. This guy is saying the architecture is ahead of PCs.
That maybe true as in general the hardware of PCs has only gotten faster and bigger but is still the same since around the 1990s. Only recently have we seen changes in chip design.
But it really does not matter. I for one do not care even if the console is using bio-technology.
I like to play *GAMES*. And if the design and play ability of a game stinks, it is going to stink to matter where you run it on.
I personally think hardware should be limited. Maybe then the focus will shift back on tight design and gameplay and not about the number of pixels on the screen.
So his evidence that PC’s “require work” is a link to someone saying “Ugh I can’t get an nvidia 7950 to work with windows 9”
So whoever wrote this article doesn’t realise
A) AMD make 7950’s and nvidia is their direct competitor
B) Windows 9 does not exist in any form
C) That he/she has almost no tech knowledge, is writing from the perspective of an uninformed customer, and posted a joke as evidence.
Seriously?
man that audio must be pritty high bitrate and would take more than 500gb with 10x todays quality
“PCs require work, consoles don’t.”
This is exactly why I have always been mainly a console gamer, ease of use. If you want to play a game you just turn it on, put the game in and you’re set. But the Xbones changed all that with mandatory installs and CD keys.
Agree. Steam has made things slightly easier for PC gaming over the years, but theres nothing better than coming home, popping in the game disk, lay back on the couch and start playing.
I’m hoping the Xbox one is just an over reaction from the public, and a lack of communication on Microsofts part. I’m hoping.
Some may call it work but others call it a hobby. I don’t have to put discs in I just double click a shortcut on my desktop.
Yeah, but with PC’s don’t you have to muck around with settings and make sure you have the latest drivers etc.
Most games auto-detect all of the video/audio settings these days.
The only thing you should need options for is to make sure the controls fit the way you like them.
Game selling service like Steam also mean you no longer have to mess around with game patching and updates which (for some reason..?) were a problem for many people.
The PC ladies make me laugh. Their elitist superiority complex is laughable at best and completely embarrassing for them at worst. They carry on like a pack of ladies at a Tupperware party if you so much as mention that they are under pressure in any department.
The PC should remain what it is intended for, spreadsheets and emails, nothing more. The lack of skill required to use a mouse and keyboard in comparison to the superior game controller is completely apparent when playing a FPS. The PC kids cry and moan so often whenever the PC is remotely challenged that its just becoming a complete joke. Harden up girls and cop it on the chin.
I’ll address the only point you made which wasn’t a straight mockery:
Mouse VS Controller;
You say:
“The lack of skill required to use a mouse and keyboard”
Then
“superior game controller”
If a controller is HARDER to use, it isn’t superior.
Why would you want to use a worse tool to complete a job, If I want to break down a wall I get a sledgehammer, not a brick.
“generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market and their unique design of the hardware”.
yep, utter BS. Mark Rein is absolutely spot on.
The simple trick to remember is that the hardware developers build new toys for the PC, and new consoles may use some of them. The PS2 and PS3 (Emotion Engine / Cell) had truly unique architecture, with the xBox and xBox 360 being very similar to PC (though a little different, the 360 was running a tri-core PowerPC chip). The new Consoles (xBone and PS4) are far more like PCs, the lack of unique hardware makes them easier/cheeper to build. the ONLY way what I’ve read about either of the “Next Gen” consoles is better than a mid level gaming PC is that they’ll basically be using an APU chip instead of a GPU and CPU, which will benifit graphics performance. That said AMD’s APUs are coming for PC soon (with some some already on the market)… Though the ones there at the moment for desktop are only quad-core, with hexa-core in a month or so.
My Gaming PC is high end (3.5Ghz hexa-core CPU, twin top of the line AMD gfx in crossfire, 16gb ram, SSD) I’ve seen nothing on the new consoles that makes me think it will have any real performance advantage over my gaming PC.
The new consoles ARE basically PCs only less useful.
It’s a sad reality that games are made for consoles these days and then ported over to PC’s. Reason being is it’s easier to make a game for something that never progresses, never pushes the boundaries and is by design, outdated before it’s even released. Consoles are already old and obsolete technology by the time they reach market the industry moves so fast. The purist PC game recognizes this and prefers to stay ahead of the curve. Consoles are more designed for the casual gamer, thumbsticks, tv’s for loungeroom comfort, a disc you run the game directly off with no prep. While this is all well and good and I have owned a few consoles in my time, it still absolutely pisses me off to see games hit the PC market which have been made for consoles and then ported to PC as an afterthought. Should be that there is development for consoles and PC’s whilst developing, or develop for PC’s and then strip out what you have to to make it run on a console. Really enjoy games like Crysis and Battlefield 3 where console gamers were barely given a 2nd thought in order to make it look and perform as good as possible on a PC rig for those who had the right hardware.
What is PC?
It’s a category. You cant compare these things and PC, it’s just a general purpose device that you can configure specially for gaming. [Before anyone ‘jumps the gun’, I own a very powerful one, and I game on it]
You buy games from a variety of stores, clients under a variety of conditions and a variety of platform OS.
PC is not one product in any meaningful way. Gaming is not even the priority of it’s evolution. Almost everyone that owns a console owns a PC [in some manner] to do everyday stuff anyway.
For this reason “PC gamer base ” is largely devided/segregated and easier to be minipulated by financial strategies and is often used to experiment both good [modding] and bad [onlineDRM] strategies on the gamers.
These experiments if successful are applied to mainstream gaming as a whole.
My Point:
PCs are and always will be more powerful, then, so are many supercomputers that can do realtime fully simulated ray tracing,
Just don’t let the feeling of superirity move your focus away from what’s important: Games, Community and consumer rights