What a stupid take
For $800 I think you can get a laptop that is more powerful than consoles, with similar GPU power, but you also get all the benefits of PC gaming. You can’t even mod most console games, which is reason enough to never buy a console. It’s just a way inferior way to game.
The $800 PC will also last longer
Divide PC by 10 and add 300 dollars to console.
Enjoy your library being mostly 30fps 720p games.
The real reason I’m better than the console plebs is that I still play multiplayer on twenty-year-old games.
Yeah, I just played CS 1.5 with my colleagues during a break. That shit just never gets old.
So old school of you to play 1.5 instead of 1.6
it hits different. dunno.)))) 1.6 feels corporate although not as much as latter iterations.
Where are you living where you can get a good console for $400?
2002
I’m certain you can build a $15K USD computer, I bet Linus Tech Tips does it regularly, but idk who tf is doing that when an nVidia 3090Ti is only $1080 and is ranked #23 on PassMark.
Why are you considering buying a 3090 Ti for $1080??? It’s an old card and shouldn’t be near that amount when you can get better performance for less money out of a 9070 xt or 5070 ti.
It’s an old #23rd best card in the world, complete without the faulty newer nVidia cables and sockets, but yeah theres no way people need to spend $15k.
I have a 3080ti and its even less, and I’m still on max settings in every game at 1440p.
If it wasn’t for Slyrim and thousands of mods, I would agree with you😅
I’ve got a modpack that graphically overhauls literally everything and Skyrim runs fine. It came out over a decade ago and made on the same engine as FO:3, it’s probably hitting the upper limits of its resource requirements if it hasn’t already.
Minecraft would also like a word!
I actually went with a 3080 that had more VRAM than the Ti version at the cost of slightly lower performance, but this unintentionally crashes some games and applications which are not made to handle more than the 4GB memory limit in some 32 bit softwares. It’s too powerful lmao. Someday we’re going to encounter a similar issue when cards regularly reach up to 64GB VRAM.
There is a program that fixes that iirc, I used it for New Vegas. Somebody here will know what it’s called.
ENBoost?
Me cycling between Minecraft and Isaac on my 10 Year Old PC that was outdated when I bought it and my baby games on the switch: 😎 (My take is, PC gaming as shit because confusing and expensive parts and console gaming is shit because companys ripping consumers off)
Let’s compare a 6 year price without games.
PC gaming
800 gaming PC 200 mid cycle update to GPU 3-5 years in
PS5
500 non-gaming PC because your ps5 isn’t a useful alternative 500 ps5 650 ps5 pro 4 years in 720 for PlayStation online basic at 10 per month
1000 vs 2370
Laughing at console gamers spending more than the cost of a basic computer on the privilege of using it online via your own internet which you also pay for
Reading this gave me a headache
What are you updating the GPU to for $200? A 1060?
500 non-gaming PC because your ps5 isn’t a useful alternative
That’s kind of a non-argument. I know a lot of people with desktop gaming PCs who also have a laptop (for school, uni, whatever). The people I know who only play games on console usually don’t have a desktop, they only have a laptop that’s not suitable for gaming. I also know a lot of people who play games on console and PC and therefore have both, plus usually a laptop. And then I also know a lot of people who don’t have ps+/xbox-whatever because they don’t play online games.
PS5
500 non-gaming PC
Come on, dude. Firstly, you can get a non-gaming PC for under $200 easy. Hell, if you know where to look, you can get it for free.
500 ps5 650 ps5 pro 4 years in
Why not just… not upgrade the PS5? Save yourself $650. If you want to “balance” things, the PC guy can save $200 on their own upgrade.
Wait for the PS6, which will be out in '27/'28 and just enjoy the OG console that was released in '20 for the life of the platform.
Like, this is obviously not an apple to apple comparison. And that’s spotting you a generous $800 PC build out of the gate. You’re simply not building a PS5 quality rig in 2020 for $800.
720 for PlayStation online basic at 10 per month
Do I get to charge the PC owner the release price of every PSO title released for free? Because that’s going to come out far higher than $720 over six years.
Are you playing any MMOs on that PC? Should we be charging you the base rate for those as well?
I’m not even a PS5 guy. I tapped out at 4 and game on my PC happily. But I’m not going to pretend console gamers are doing 3x my spend just because it’s possible to do so.
Only a tiny minority of PC gamers pay monthly for anything.
You can’t upgrade the PS5, and the sale price of your 5-year-old unit is like $100.
Free games aren’t included in the 10 per month.
The cost of 18 per month to also have old games costs 1300 over 6 years.
The PC you can get for $200 will be awful to use or die within 3 years or both. It will be ridiculous to repair, so you will buy another 200 special hating the shit you bought both times.
Basically at the root a PC and a console are both good for about 6 years but the 700-1300 you pay for online is going to dwarf the buy up from acceptable PC to gaming PC+ hardware.
Cheap PC are the value option expensive pc are the quality option.
Consoles are kind of in between.
Are we talking about a new 200$ pc?
Because if you buy used you can get a very decent non gaming pc for that money.
Maybe I got lucky, my current desktop was 350€ used with a pretty modern and fast CPU (5800x) and a somewhat outdated GPU (vega56).
350€ = 405 USD once you add in a mouse keyboard and monitor you are over 500 the figure I used. Decrease your figures further and it gets shittier fast.
We would have to include used game consoles too then, which I think is fair. If we are talking about just the desktop box and no peripherals though, I think we could make an equivalent xbox one or ps5 for close to the same price. Thats assuming the purchaser is tech savvy enough to navigate deals at places like newegg and microcenter.
Only a tiny minority of PC gamers pay monthly for anything.
That’s simply not true.
I didn’t say they didn’t watch netflix or have internet.
PC gamers don’t pay a monthly fee connected to their gaming.
So PC GamePass isn’t a thing? If Valve offered a solid subscription offering, gamers would be all over it.
I was into the PCMR sub back when you could build a machine that ran better than the current console generation for the same price as the two main consoles. And it’s not like consoles perform so above and beyond a PC that there’s little difference today; the PC hardware just exploded in price so it costs so much more to make something that runs as good or better than a PS5, which is sold at a loss.
It’s possible to build a competent gaming manchine if you’re ok with 1080p. A ten year old card still runs 1080p perfectly fine.
I have a Ryzen 5500 on a radeon 550. It plays mostly everything at 720 to 1080. It’ll do lite 4k but it does what it needs to do.
I bought a Acer nitro with a 3050 in it for my teenager. 🤷 It’s perfectly fine. She plays mostly counter strike anyway.
I play a bunch of indie stuff and remasters… Unless you want 60fps in cyberpunk in 4k ultra ray tracing… You can get into a pretty decent build for well under 1k.
My VR rig built just before the first COVID lockdowns is already capable of keeping up with the PS5 in performance mode; but it was also about $900 mostly from the GPU (a 1660 Super because the 2070 Cyberpunk Edition card was sold out).
I don’t need 4K, but I definitely would like to be able to have raytracing in Cyberpunk, specifically. It’s the only game I’ve seen them used beyond shadows and it looks amazeballs. My GPU is one generation too old to even support RTX, tho. Or DLSS!
If you have a microcenter somewhat close by, they get refurbished 20 and 30 series cards all the time for really good prices. They let you come back and return/swap it out if you dont like it too. Last I looked my store just got a shipment of 4080s that are priced at 750$ as well.
Yeah but you have to spend so much money on games and with PC you can almost play anything for free and games add up fast
Yep so many amazing games for $5-20 on steam sales often not even that old
That’s only part of the story. Consoles have many benefits, like warranty, consistency, drivers, software, etc. I built some reasonable budget gaming machines back then, but I still bought consoles and still do to this day because of their superiority.
Subscription to access multiplayer on third party servers 🤡
I agree you are a clown but I’m not familiar with that because as a decent person, I don’t play multiplayer.
The whole idea of “superiority” is so dumb. People should get what works for them.
For most normies/noobs, they don’t even know how to start thinking of gaming PCs. No ideas of GPUs. Don’t want to make the wrong choice and overpay for an ancient system labeled “gaming ready”. Consoles work great in not having to think about anything and just playing. Also you get exclusives. It comes at the cost of higher price, online subscriptions, system lock in, few options for mid cycle upgrade, etc.
PC works great for me and I haven’t had a console in 20 years. I’d recommend it to anyone who is even slightly inclined to learn the basics. The Steam Deck would be a great console experience for anyone…but the sales number compared to the Switch and lack of mainstream recognition shows that a lot of people don’t have an appetite for PC gaming. Fine, use what works for you.
Another problem is that online PC communities have a real obsession with going “top tier”. Most people can do perfectly well with last generation parts and secondhand or refurbished bargains. Budget gaming, retro gaming, patient gaming, are all valid and cheap.
The whole idea of “superiority” is so dumb. People should get what works for them.
I think you’re taking an unserious humorous thing too seriously.
For most normies/noobs, they don’t even know how to start thinking of gaming PCs. No ideas of GPUs. Don’t want to make the wrong choice and overpay for an ancient system labeled “gaming ready”.
I doubt the person who is this afraid of gaming pcs also worried about being ripped off.
Also, there are more resources than ever to figure out a decent build or to ask people to tell you if a build is decent.
Another problem is that online PC communities have a real obsession with going “top tier”.
They most certainly do not. I don’t think you frequent these places.
Probably the most common build combo is a 9600, 9060XT 16GB build. Thats around 1100 USD. Thats just a bit more than a console while performing a lot better.
As for second hand or refurbished, that can help, but you sometimes can be getting a worse value, as they fall out of support faster or don’t support modern features and you have to be ok with them not being good at ray tracing for instance, or not doing well with ai upscaling, or not being able to do framegen. There are third party software solutions for all of the above, but most people don’t want to deal with the effort required for those. Luckily FSR4 might be coming to some older AMD cards.
Spending one fifth of that will perform better than a $750 console (PS5 Pro)
The consoles are “cheap” because the controllers, games, and subscription services are expensive.
It’s far, far, far cheaper to game on a PC in the long run. You can buy a pc capable of playing many games for as little as $300 (gmtek or similar micro pc sporting high performance amd cpu). If you want better graphics, you plug a gpu into that for $260 or so (Radeon 9060).
Steam is crazy cheap. Multiple sales a year, and if you don’t like a game you can get a full refund. Free AAA games every week as well from GOG, Epic, and rarely but surely, also Steam.
Yes, Yes, this is true! (I say after spending multiple thousands on a gaming PC where this is absolutely not true).
I’ll second this, actually. I used to hate on PC gaming for around a decade or so because it always seemed to prohibitively expensive to me compared to a console. But after building my very first PC with used parts off ebay for around 300-400€ in total, I think, I can confirm that it works really well overall.
Most of the games I’ve played so far perform really well, some even play on highest settings (and that’s with just a 1080 ti), and it’s a PC, so multitasking, office work, homework and whatnot are all possible. Running the OS and games off an SSD makes loading times quite fast compared to the PS5’s SSD, sometimes even faster.
And I haven’t spent a single Euro on games because of a plethora of 🏴☠️ options, which is possible on console depending on the console, but ultimately hinges on jailbreaking your console and voiding a potential warranty.
Overall, I’m very pleased with my PC experience right now. Ever since building the PC, I haven’t played on console, and that’s coming from someone who was playing on console pretty much exclusively since around 2017
My Xbox and PlayStation both came with a full normal controller, and console games are constantly on sale. I have absolutely no idea what you’re trying to get at here.
The point of the submission is that PC dumbfucks don’t know how to compare apples to apples. Console gaming is objectively superior due to the benefits of things like warranty, consistency, drivers, software, etc.
Ah yes, all the benefits of having the privilege to pay $10 a month to play online, only have enough storage space for like 5 games with no expansion options, barred access to the vast majority of games, and limited options for voice chat and input devices.
But I guess if you’re like 12 and all you play is 2k/madden/fifa/maybe COD and your parents are paying for it then it’s probably fine.
Software and driver issues like clicking update? Waiting for a reboot?
The same one year warranty that your PC has?
A controller is like 20 bucks. My PC can play the vast majority of games ever made out of the box, and for free if I’m willing to commit some crimes.
I understand this is a joke, but 15k? Wtf. I think you meant server, not PC
The number gets higher and higher every time a console dweeb makes the argument that they’re not constantly fucking themselves.
Flagship Nvidia is around $10k. Easy to spend at least another $5k on the rest of the computer+setup (monitors, peripherasls…).
That isn’t something normal people buy you can spend any amount on anything but its really fringe rich people shit.
That’s not a gaming GPU, that’s workstation GPU. Meme says “gamers”. I genuinely don’t think you can spend 15k even if you went for limited edition.
An ROG 5090 Dhahab Edition is half of the $15k. Add a boutique case, custom cooling loop, overkill RAM and storage, and you just might hit $15k. Definitely a stretch though.
I did not even realize you could run games on these GPUs… I guess I learn something every day. It would still be hard to spend 5k on the rest of the PC without throwing money away on visuals and other performance unrelated stuff, but I guess you may be able to do it depending on what you still consider performance improvements…
I miss the days when $500 could build a “console killer”
These days its like 1500. But you still get all the advantages like being able to do whatever you want with it like using productive software to actually do work. Streaming, editing, rendering, 3D modeling or printing, game dev, etc
You will also most likely still make that difference back over the cycle of one console generation through better game deals and no subscription fees for online play.
Also: INDIE GAMES 🎉✨
Because getting your game published in Sonys or Microsofts store is horrible afaik.
For Xbox its a little bit easier since they launched ID@xbox and pushed it the last few years. Not perfect, but way better than Sony
I’m still a PC player through and through, but I will say that the game subscriptions that give you access to AAA games (albeit sometimes a bit after launch) is pretty enticing. Obviously you get better sales and whatnot through Steam, but not having to shell out 50-70 dollars for a new game is pretty cool.
You didn’t hear? That shit is getting nerfed.
My roommate mentioned there was a price increase recently. It is pretty pricey.
It is nowhere near 1500.
More like 800.
For a nice PC that will last you a while 1100 (for like a 9600 + 9060XT)
I would say a console killer has to outperform a current gen console. A Xbox Series X has a GPU equivalent to something between a 9060XT and a 9070XT. So yeah in total 1100€ is probably gonna get you something comparable.
Every guide I’ve seen says even a 9060XT 16gb is very overkill compared to consoles.
You don’t have to justify buying a PC to your mum and dad because it can do Word anymore lol
I miss the days when $500 were enough to buy a console.
That was a brief period when consoles were way over priced for the components they had.
That period repeats every 3-5 years approximatly towards the end of a generation but before the new generation is announced.
We’re at that point now. Hard to believe, but the PS5 has been out for five years now.
The reason it’s not happening this time is because Moore’s Law is dead. The original formulation was that cost of integrated components would be cut in half every x months. The value of x changed around over the years, but settled on 24. That cost factor is gone and probably won’t come back without a major breakthrough.
There are improvements in the size of integrated components (which often gets mistakenly labeled as Moore’s Law), but they aren’t getting cheaper anymore.
Ps5 sets my record for most dead joysticks, followed by the Nintendo Switch joycon disaster.
PS4 I had a few controllers die, but that was parts physically breaking.
PS3 I never lost a controller.
I have to go back to N64 for any other broken controllers where the sticks die or buttons break.
PS3 I had to get a new controller, but only because the dog ate the analog sticks lmao. Still using the Mini USB cable it came with 🫡
I had to replace the Micro USB port in two DS4s. I don’t even blame Sony for it, Micro USB is ass. I do blame them for both controllers getting stick drift later though.
I don’t use the PS5 enough for the controller to break.
I’m 3/3 on ps5 controllers breaking.
I bought the pro controller when it came out and it hasn’t broken.
There was a generation where it was true at the launch of the console. That’s the period I’m talking about. Beating a 5 year old machine is hardly worth bragging about.
We are talking about price relative to performace, not performance in general.
But the cost of the hardware is anyways not so relevant when the price difference of the software easily makes up the difference.
Yes, and you could beat the price of a PS4 at release with a pc that performed the same. No other console generation had such bad price/performance
Nah it’s the GPU market. Cryptocurrency briefly exploded and now AI is sucking up all of the GPU manufacturing capacity. Back in 2019 I got my RX580 for $175. The AMD 9070 that released this year is a tier down from that and had an MSRP of $550, but an actual price more like $650. The sweet spot of value PC building has shifted from $750 to $1,500 in just a few years. Some of that is just general inflation that affects all parts, but roughly half of that increase is just from the GPU.
It’s impacting consoles too. Consoles uses to get cheaper over time, with both price drops to existing models and new, cheaper models being released (Sony’s Slim models, things like the Wii Family Edition and Wii Mini, the DSLite, etc). Looking at this generation… The original PS5 with a disc drive debuted at $500 in 2020. The “Slim” version also debuted at $500, and just got a price increase to $550. They released a PS5 Pro at $700, and just increased it to $750.
Nintendo is doing it too. The Switch was $300 for its entire life, and now that the Switch 2 is out consumers would typically expect a price cut to move the existing stock. Instead, Nintendo raised the price to $330. The OLED model went from $350 to $400, and the Lite went from $200 to $230.
And of course Microsoft is in on it too. It’s more complicated to write up since they have different storage variants of the Series S|X, but for example a Series S 512GB was $300 at launch (For some reason I remember seeing them for $250, but maybe that was a Black Friday sale or something). Now it’s $400!
Aren’t a lot of those price increases US centric due to asinine tariffs.
They’ve increased in other countries too. The PS5 digital edition costs £70 more today than it did at launch. In 2024 Sony increased the Japan price of all PS5 versions by ¥13,000.
The tariffs aren’t helping, but this has been a trend for years. The gaming console market is not very volatile- prices changes in the US usually happen once every few years, not every few months. The tariffs keep fluctuating all over the place and I would not be shocked if there are more pricing adjustments for consoles specifically next year.
You can blame crypto, you can blame AI, but when it comes down to it everything is worth what people are willing to pay. Clearly companies are pushing that further and further and people keep paying.
I recall it being a period of at least 10 years. A prior generation GPU would run about $150-200. The CPU/Mobo was the most expensive part
They still are
If they were, then you could build a PC for cheaper.
You can. But with used parts which feels like has always been the case.
You still easily can with second hand components.
Thanks etherium
Yeah, but all those people buying wonky 2GB “PS4 equivalent” GPUs ended up pretty quiet when games later in the generation started using more and more VRAM.
The PS4 CPU was a joke, but it could use a lot of textures.
It really depends on whether you want the newest games with 128k graphics. I game on a 5 year old Thinkpad* and a first gen switch and am happy about it.
*granted, it was refurbished and still like 2700€, but the same laptop would be cheaper today
Wasn’t that just around the second half of the PS360 generation and the PS4 era until crypto blew up?
PCs were always pretty expensive since my childhood in the 1980s.
I want to say late 2000’s to early 2010’s was when my friends and I all built our own PCs for about $500.
Me with my 5090 I have only played 4.5 games on because I hate dark patterns
Wait the section on “Psychological Dark Patterns” sounds kind of over inclusive. Leveling up and progressing are thing that give a sense of accomplishment. Granted, things like cs2 skins are a form of manipulation. But you can’t tell me that making a build on a game like DND or building a world you like on Minecraft are “dark patterns”
Leveling up and progressing are thing that give a sense of accomplishment.
Indeed. They are built to trigger your reward system rather than having you feel that naturally from the gameplay.
I absolutely think those are included and utterly hate grinding.
But you can’t tell me that making a build on a game like DND or building a world you like on Minecraft are “dark patterns”
Where are you getting that from there?
Clarification. I’m way to asleep and meant wow, not DND. Forget I said anything. I still think I’m right. But I’m not in the correct state to even formulate coherent sentences
