The PC Leapfrog...

[nasd90]

Well, I finally got a taste of how much the PC is going to squash the XBOX/PS3 console realm.

I was fortunate enough to have a friend practically give me his gaming machine because he made so much money on a stock that will remain nameless.

It's got an Intel Duo Core Extreme proc, two 750GB SATA's, 2GB ram, and two 8800 GTX's... It screams.

I loaded 64-bit Vista Ultimate and have been playing Halo 2 for Vista this weekend. Insane. AND I just got a Dell 3007FPW-HC 30 inch high color LCD monitor delivered to run 2650x1600, which is in NVIDIA's terminology... eHD... EXTREME HD.

See ya' consoles. Just wait until CRYSIS comes out.

Nick

 

[Sheep]

Agreed.

SheepStar

 

[Wafflesomd]

Uh, halo 2 on pc looks like junk.

Ask him to fire up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with settings maxed.

 

[Thunder18]

PC's will always be capable of better graphics than consoles simply because you can upgrade them, but at what cost? Truth be told, I don't need a 256 MB 8x AGP video card for 95% of what I do on the computer(web surfing, creating documents and watching the occassional dvd). In fact, the only reason I have such a video card is because of a game I bought that I could not even run with the prior card. Now I will give credit where credit is due. The visuals on a game with all the effects turned up and a video card that can handle it is great!
What I don't like is buying a $40 computer game and then having to spend another $150 to buy an improved graphics card so that I can actually playit. Same deal with RAM and hard disk space. On that note, did anyone play the old Wing commander games. I remember having maybe a 286 back in the day and marveling at the 8 floppy discs that came with the game and that I had to buy a sound card to hear the in game speech. Wing commander 3 had me buying a cd-rom drive and installing more ram. I pretty much had to buy a new computer for Wing commander 4.
PC gaming is like an ever escalating arms race with no end in sight! Give me a console with a decent product life cycle. Yeah, my PS3 may have cost $600 and I did get an extra controller and a $6 HDMI cable, but I should be able to play ANY PS3 game that comes out during it's lifecycle without running into inadequate hardware issues.

 

[Audioholics]

I don't see too many gaming PCs hooked up to a 100-inch screen...

I think I'll keep my Xbox 360 for now, but I DO appreciate the advanced graphics that are possible when you can upgrade a video processsor every other year. These gaming consoles tend to stay fixed for like 4-5 years - which means that around the end of the run PCs are looking pretty smokin'.

Remember Doom3 and Half Life 2 when they debuted? Made the current Xbox look like an Atari 2600.

What woud be nice is if Microsoft and Sony, et al would consider upgrading the graphics chips every other year - heck, they'd sell more boxes and games could easily (I'll bet) be developed to take advantage of additional polygons, atmosphere, frame rate and texture map capability when a newer chipset was detected.

 

[Sheep]

I don't see too many gaming PCs hooked up to a 100-inch screen...

I think I'll keep my Xbox 360 for now, but I DO appreciate the advanced graphics that are possible when you can upgrade a video processsor every other year. These gaming consoles tend to stay fixed for like 4-5 years - which means that around the end of the run PCs are looking pretty smokin'.

Remember Doom3 and Half Life 2 when they debuted? Made the current Xbox look like an Atari 2600.

What woud be nice is if Microsoft and Sony, et al would consider upgrading the graphics chips every other year - heck, they'd sell more boxes and games could easily (I'll bet) be developed to take advantage of additional polygons, atmosphere, frame rate and texture map capability when a newer chipset was detected.

Buy me a HD LCD and I'll hook up my Rig to a big screen. The reason people don't hook up giant screens are as follows.

1.) They're expensive
2.) Most PC monitors will look just as good, and cost less.
3.) Try taking a projector to a LAN.
4.) PC is single player, so you don't need a massive screen to fill with other player boxes. It's only about 1 person. How often to do you see a 5 seater race car?

SheepStar

 

[Audioholics]

Bah, you don't need LAN parties with Xbox Live.

Screens are cheap - $250 gets you a cheap, portable 80-inch screen these days. Cheaper than most graphics cards.

To each his own. I'm not putting down PC games. That's competition I want around - makes the graphics card industry progress faster and the games look better.

 

[Wafflesomd]

Xbox lan parties are always fun