This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Consoles are just increasingly bad value for consumers compared to PCs.
they can be portable computers built for gaming
Are they tho? Have you seen graphics card prices?
2060 super for 300, and then another 200 for a decent processor puts you ahead of a ps5 and for a comparable price. Games are cheaper on PC too, as well as a broader selection. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/zYGmJn here is a mid tier build for 850, you could cut the procesor down, install linux for free, and im sure youve got a computer monitor laying around somwhere... the only thing stopping you is inertia.
2060 super for 300, and then another 200 for a decent processor puts you ahead of a ps5 and for a comparable price.
you're going to have to really scrunge up for deals in order to get psu, storage, memory, motherboard, and a case for your remaining budget of $0.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/zYGmJn here is a mid tier build for 850
This is $150 more expensive and the gpu is half as performant as the reported PS5 pro equivalent.
You don't need a graphics card. You can get mini PCs with decent gaming performance for cheap these days.
By decent you meant significantly worse than console gaming performance though.
Consoles are still the king for values in gaming, even with their increasing prices.
The ones with capable GPUs cost as much as a PS5 Pro.
There are CPUs with quite capable iGPU, fitting in a mini-PC. All in all maybe $500.
And yeah, sure, the article mentioned that consoles are subsidized by game prices.
Interesting point. Then you understand why Apple is making moves to try to be a real player in gaming.
All three of us see how gaming performance is plateauing across various hardware types to the point that a modern game can run on a wide range of hardware. With settings changes to scale across the hardware, of course.
Or are you going to be a bummer and claim it’s only mini pcs that get this benefit. Not consoles, not VR headsets, not macs, not Linux laptops.
There really is a situation going on where there is a large body of hardware in a similar place on the performance curve in a way that wasn’t always true in the past. Historically, major performance gains were made every few years. And various platforms were on very different and less interoperable hardware architectures, etc.
The Steam Deck’s success proves my point, and your point alone.
The thing is, people don’t wanna hear it. They wanna focus on the very high end. Or super high refresh rates. Or they wanna complain about library sizes.
That sounds kind of like a console, no?
Edit: I mean, if the intent is gaming and only gaming, it feels like there's a lot of overlap. Only the PC would have less support for more freedom.
I mean, for the price of a mid range graphics card I can still buy a whole console. GPU prices are ridiculous. Never mind everything else on top of that.
GPU prices are ridiculous, but those GPUs are also ridiculously more powerful than anything in any console.
The rough equivalent to a PS5Pro's GPU component is a ... not current gen, not last gen, but the gen before that... find AMD's weakest GPU model in the 6 series, the RX 6600, and that is roughly the same performance as the GPU performance of a PS5Pro.
The Switch 2 may have an interesting, custom mobile grade Nvidia APU, but at this point, its not out yet, no benchmarks, etc.
Oh right also: If GPU prices for PCs remain elevated... well, any future consoles will also have elevated prices. Perhaps not to the same degree, but again, that will be because a console will be basically fairly low tier if you compared it to the range of PC hardware... and console mfgs can subsidize console costs with game sales... and they get discounts on ordering the components that go into their consoles by ordering in huge bulk volumes.
Yeah but remember to factor in that you probably already need a normal computer for non-game purposes so if you also use that for games you only have to buy one device not two
I just built a PC after not having a computer for about 5+ years.
Built it for games, did not feel like I was missing out on anything in particular except games by not having a computer. There's a lot of things I'd rather use a computer for but these days most of what I used to do on a computer can be done just fine from a phone or tablet.
During those 5 or so years, I maybe needed to use a computer about a dozen times, and if my wife didn't have a computer I could have just swung by a library for a bit to take care of it.
To me tablets feel like the most useless devices ever invented. Too large to carry around with you but just as stupidly limited as a phone compared to a real computer where you can actually automate some of your tasks and type on a decent keyboard and have a decent sized screen that doesn't ruin your wrists with the weight of holding it up.
You can build a pretty capable PC for about $600. And you won't have to pay for multiplayer.
Along with paying for multiplayer I get access to a large catalog of games as well as additional games every month. Yes they’re inaccessible if I stop paying, but that’s not really a big deal. Even all that aside, I pretty much play single player games anyway.
Also, when a game comes out I know it’ll work. No driver bugs, no messing with settings, no checking minimum and recommended specs, it just works. And it works the same for everyone on the platform. I don’t have any desire to spend a bunch of time tweaking settings to get things just right, only to have the game crash for some esoteric reason or another.
"Pretty capable" will get you dunked on in the PC gaming world. For what I've seen PC gamers actually recommend I could buy 2-3 modern consoles.
Tbh the only consoles I’ve been really interested in lately are the switch and steam deck, simply because they’re also mobile devices.
The Steam Deck is basically a PC. You can get mini PCs with APUs of a similar performance for very low prices these days. That won't perform like a current gen console but it's a cheap gaming machine with a huge selection of low cost games and you won't have to pay for multiplayer.
Is it Moores law failing or have we finally reached the point where capitalists are not even pretending to advance technology in order to charge higher prices? Like are we actually not able to make things faster and cheaper anymore or is the market controlled by a monopoly that sees no benefit in significantly improving their products? My opinion has been leaning more and more towards the latter since the pandemic.
This has little to do with "capitalists" and everything to do with the fact that we've basically reached the limit of silicon.
I don't agree. It is capitalism, but not in a bad way. Simply put it is economy logic. Chip market has shifted from consumer market to the enterprise market.
So because the supply is limited, the demand has gone way up, and enteprise market has a lot, a mean a lot of money to spare buying, because it is an investment for them and not entertainment.
Also some bad capitalist tacticts in other areas, hard drives for example, that the big players reduced production to keep prices from falling. They cotribute to the problem, but they are not the major factor.
The consoles unless you root or jailbreak them are too restrictive anyway. For older games you can just use an emulator on your PC or mobile.
