In this thread about which console someone should buy, I tried to suggest in a non-adversarial way that the OP should consider turning his computer into a gaming computer for less cost and better results. This got me blasted, and if I were to respond there, I would get blamed for hijacking the thread when it wasn’t my intention. So I’m starting a new thread, both to address the responses people gave me in that thread, and in general just to try to dispell some myths and give some knowledge about PC gaming.
The most important issue is that people have a mistaken impression that a “gaming PC” costs thousands of dollars to build. This isn’t true. Sure, Alienware sells way overpriced PCs with overpriced top of the line components, and you can run up the price paying for the top end of everything if you wanted because it carries a very steep price premium, but it is in no way necesary to enjoy good quality gaming on the PC. I’ve been a “hardcore” PC gamer for years and the most I’ve ever spent on a computer is $1200… and that’s when I had a lot of money and I was kind of splurging. The other idea is that you MUST upgrade your hardware every few months or you can’t play new games, which is also bullshit. I build a new system roughly once every 3 years, and it works well enough for the duration and only when it’s really starting to show its age will I upgrade it. You have the option of upgrading constantly if you always want the absolute best, but by no means is it a requirement.
Another issue is that you don’t necesarily have to build a “gaming pc” from the ground up. There’s a good chance that if you have any sort of recent hardware on the computer that you’re using to read this post right now, then you already have a case, power supply, ram, decent CPU, keyboard, mouse, DVD drive, hard drives, monitor, etc. You have most of the computer right there. If you have any sort of decent modern CPU - even something low end like a 2 ghz core2duo (price? $40 +/-) processor and 2gb of ram (price $30 +/-), you will be able to run pretty much any game at reasonable settings if you simply add a good video card. You also don’t need to learn how to build a computer from the ground up to do this - you’d just need to open the side of your case and swap out a video card, which is a very easy process.
I made a case in this thread that current generation consoles are comically underpowered relative to current PC hardware. Specifically, this post details the hardware comparisons. I said in that thread that this $35 video card ($25 after rebate!) plugged into a modern low/mid end computer would outperform either console graphically, and I stand by that. However, I wouldn’t recommend that - if you’re building a gaming machine you might as well get something decent by modern standards. This $144 5850 Radeon card is an insanely good deal. It’s a DX11 card so it can run the most advanced features out there, and it’s at least 30 or 40 times more powerful than the GPU in the xbox 360 (made by ATI, the same company, so it’s directly comparable).
It may sound hard to believe, but really, why? We all know computers advance at an incredible pace. Last year’s top of the line hardware is this year’s bargain. Computers are able to get twice as fast every few years. So why is it hard to believe that the hardware in consoles, which is low to mid end in the first place to save costs, which are locked into whatever hardware they had when they were first designed would be woefully behind years later? Video cards/GPUs are by far the most important component in a gaming system and their development cycle is typically about 6 months. So every 6 months, there’s a significant advance in GPUs. So after 4-5 years, current GPUs are way ahead of the GPUs of 2005.
Most of the X360’s library is available for the PC too. I can’t think of many big budget titles that aren’t offhand. Forza 2/3, Halo 3, and the last few years of Madden are the only ones I can think of. There are more I’m sure, but I would imagine at least 80% of the X360’s library is available on PC. But it doesn’t work so much in the reverse. There are lots of PC games that don’t make it to console because of control limitations, hardware limitations, or distribution/licensing issues.
For example, here’s a list of stuff on my PC right now that I couldn’t play on a console:
Civilization 4
Arma 2
Flight Simulator X
World in Conflict
Crysis
Warcraft 3
Sins of a Solar Empire
World of Warcraft
Silent Hunter 4
IL2: 1946
Empire: Total War
Battlefield 2
Dangerous Waters
Audiosurf
Darwinia
Defcon
Garry’s mod
Red Orchestra
Counterstrike: Source
Trials 2
Battlefield 1942
Rome: Total war
Hearts of Iron 2
That list isn’t exhaustive, just stuff I’ve played lately and have currently installed.
Additionally every PC game ever made is available for play. Some really old ones require some tweaking (simply setting a compatability mode in the file properties works well most of the time) and really old ones require a DOS emulator, but there are still plenty of old games worth playing.
And every game plays better on the PC. Superior controls, superior graphics, better multiplayer systems (this is why people are so irate over modern warfare 2 - they’re trying to dumb down the excellent PC multiplayer model with console garbage), and superior moddability.
A lot of people say “but I prefer playing [whatever] genre with a gamepad!” - well, my first response to that is that if you prefer playing a shooter game with a gamepad then you should be honor killed by your family. But even so, PCs do not put limitations on your control choices. When I play racing games because I don’t have a wheel, I use my xbox 360 controller through a $15 wireless xbox usb receiver. I use a joystick for flight sims. You can control games with whatever peripherals you want.
The graphics are unquestionably and demonstrably superior. I detailed this more in the thread linked above. Even games that are just ports and aren’t specially designed for the PC look way better. I play at 1680x1050 resolution which is roughly 3 times what graphically intense Xbox 360 games run at. I get all sorts of high quality post processing effects like 16x anisotropic filtering and a huge range of antialiasing options. I get more detailed particle effects. There are more detailed physics. It’s hard to describe without seeing it in action. It’s sort of like HDTV vs SDTV… you think SDTV looks fine and you don’t know what you’re missing until you see HDTV, and then suddenly it’s painfully obvious how crappy SDTV is.
As for the multiplayer superiority, I covered that in a lot of detail here.
As far as moddability goes - it’s huge. It takes many forms - just having more ability to tweak gameplay settings by editing configuration files is one example, having far more control over all sorts of aspects of the game. In some games, like Oblivion or Fallout 3, there’s a community out there that makes thousands of little (or some big) gameplay tweaks which lets you customize your gameplay in whatever way you want it. Fallout 3 is relatively good out of the box, but the stock Oblivion gameplay is crap whereas a modded Oblivion is a really great game. But you would never know if you only played the console version.
Modding also leads to “total conversion” mods which basically create an entirely new (free) game out of the old one by changing everything. Counter-strike, probably the most popular multiplayer game of all time (it’s still going strong 10 years later with often over 100,000 people playing at a time) was originally a half life mod. Desert Combat for battlefield 1942 is probably the most fun multiplayer game I’ve ever played. There are hundreds of these sorts of mods. If you bought half-life or half-life 2, you could play any of these hundreds of essentially new games for free - all done by volunteer work of people creating works of love. Other games have plenty of mods too, of course - but half-life seems like the gold standard of moddability given how many popular ones there are.
Anyway, hit me with your attacks and questions. If anyone is interested in how to go about creating or buying a gaming PC, I’ll help with that. If you want to know if yours is good enough to convert it into one I’ll try to tell you. If you want to bash me because I insulted your precious consoles, feel free.