PC vs. Console: Converting to the Master Race

Just a mere few weeks later, I have now clocked in over a hundred hours and might I add, it is running tremendously. Of course, I could not max it out but with moderately high settings it maintains a frame-rate at around 45-50fps, meanwhile the console version sometimes struggles to maintain a frame-rate at 30fps. Although my experience of multiplayer games on PC in the past has been very hit and miss, often with far more drop outs , lag and hackers, than on Xbox Live, GTA V’s online experience runs exceptionally well and functions stably the vast majority of the time! I can without a doubt say that this is one of the best experiences of the generation so far, while I thought the original release on Xbox 360 and PS3 was good, but hardly ground-breaking.

And all this comes after a massive downpour of disapproval from many PC gamers regarding the games delay and how they are still expected to pay full price. Sure, it is easy to criticize Rockstar for being a little lazy and greedy- I’d just say they are smart businessmen.  Nonetheless,  for the game to look this beautiful and run so well even on, what are effectively now lower-end PC’s, we must praise them for doing a great job with optimization- far greater than GTA IV’s, and much better than most other companies in the industry! So you can take your negativity and you know where to stuff it, because this is a momentous release- and it is better than it has ever been before!

Effectively my fickle faith in PC was restored. With a game like GTA V running so efficiently, I had to wonder why I had pre-ordered the open world RPG, The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt on Xbox One at 30fps with an adaptive resolution. Surely my PC can do better than that…

I was able to run The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings smoothly on PC set on very high settings, and it is still widely regarded as one of the nicest looking games of all time. CD Project Red are experts at optimization as made evident by their success at porting Witcher 2 to the Xbox 360 with little more than a decrease in resolution, I mean that takes some doing!

Then there was the rude awakening when I evaluated my PC on system requirements lab, to see how capably it could deal with The Witcher 3. My eyes almost teared up at the sight of red, indicating that my graphics card and processor did not meet the minimum requirements.

That was it. That’s the end of it. Just under 2 years of a generation, my PC has lasted me before it became out-dated. To compare, the cheaper Xbox 360 was released in 2005 with a bunch of PS2 ports, but it was able to run The Witcher 2, in 2012.

Xbox didn’t evolve, it didn’t do anything except continued to perform at the same standard it always performed at, and therefore, developers were forced to design their games in a way that would make the most out of the hardware they had. They could not just go crazy with textures, polygon count and draw distance and just take for granted that everyone’s system could run it. There is a reason why final game releases tend to look a lot different to the stage demo’s at video game conferences like E3. Visuals must be adapted to the console, to ensure it performs on that hardware and these game developers don’t always offer PC gamers the same courtesy. This is the advantage console gaming has always had, and always will have. The games are one-size-fits-all per platform, and for consoles that works for the standardized design, but when applied to hundreds and thousands of different PC variants, the results can be a mixed bag!

And so if you bring anything away from this, let it be this. PC gaming is not inherently inferior to consoles, nor is it necessarily superior. They are two very different beasts. If you are a console gamer that wishes to be a PC gamer, you need to be prepared to make that big leap of faith, to really put your money where your mouth is and future-proof your rig to ensure that it can stand the strenuous test of time. Your up-front losses will be compensated over-time by the amount you save on games and so thus, it is a viable option. I certainly will continue to be a PC gamer, and am already considering correcting my last mistake by future-proofing my rig this time around. However, consoles will always be relevant for me. In fact I believe the two can complement each other, depending on the types of games you play and the kind of player that you are. I am a strategy and graphic adventure fan, so the PC is relevant as those are mostly exclusive to PC.

I am a fan of racing games and using controllers for shooters, so consoles are relevant as consoles have many exclusive racing games, and all players use controllers. PC and console aren’t two peas in a pod, but rather two separate pods with their own different peas. The games on console may look less pretty and may run less smoothly, and maybe I’m something of a corporate slave, but at the end of the day I don’t need to do any of the dirty work, downloading drivers and patches or fitting new hardware – I don’t need to second-guess my system’s capabilities. Just plug in and play. To conclude, if you want to encourage console gamers to join the PC gaming scene, you should do so in a way that is not betraying their trust or putting all their eggs in one basket. You need to convince them to go for a powerhouse right away. While some may be scared off large price-tags, the ones that are determined enough will probably be satisfied and remain as PC gamers in the foreseeable future.

I think PC gamers need a new motto, and I can think of none more fitting than this: “Go big or go home”