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Xbone vs PS4 vs PC


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  • 2 weeks later...

Mantle could help consoles, but you still wont get higher antialiasing or anistropic filtering (things that make sub-4K resolution games look better) nor higher resolution textures. I'm not sure consoles will support G-Sync as you need an nVidia card to utilize that.

 

I do feel that this video's "performance/high end" PC is a bit on the too expensive side, as I spent about half of that on my current box and get similar performance.

 

It is an interesting comparison either way. PC gaming is not for everyone but I think if you look at it objectively you find that even if you put more money up front into building/buying a PC, with the amount you save on games (as they sometimes release at lower price than console counterpart, or drop in price sooner, or even hit the steam sale) you end up spending less money in the end. Once I crunched the numbers there was no question which one was right for me.

 

I'm actually interested in seeing how much money I have saved, I'll get back to you on that (off to crunch numbers).

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So, I needed a break from the mundane end of semester ass kicking and did some interesting analysis.

 

 

So my PC would be considered an above average gaming PC. By no means is this what you have to spend to have a great experience, in fact I find the sweet spot to be around ~$1100 (+/-$100). This provides a great price to performance ratio.

 

 

Next, I went through my receipts on games I have gotten on PC, totaled what I spent on each game and then found the retail price for those games, then totaled everything up.

 

 

Amount of games owned: 70

Amount of major titles owned: 46 (major titles as in BF/COD/Bioshock/Crysis/Metro)

Money spent on those games: $390.39

Total value of games: $1454.49

Total savings in games: $1055.10 (Retail cost - Money Spent on games)

Cost of computer: $1767.58

 

 

Grand Total: $2100

 

 

Now for the interesting part, I wondered how far $2100 would go on a console.

 

 

For this I considered a few things. I found that the average gamer buys ~4 new games per year. In my time of owning my PS3 I had to buy 2 controllers and a headset. I'm guessing unless you break controllers left and right, 2 controllers for 5 years is a good average. As for the headset, I bought a pair of Trittons and some TB x12s. But I think on average a person will get 1 headset every 5 years. On average, gaming headsets cost ~$80.

 

 

The base set up costs for Xbox One are:

 

 

Console: $499

1 Yr XBL Gold: $59.99

New Game: $59.99

Controller: $74.99

 

 

Year 1

Console, XBL Gold, 4 Games, Headset

Total: $878.95

 

 

Year 2

XBL Gold, 4 Games

Total: $299.95

 

 

Year 3

XBL Gold, 4 Games, 1 Controller

Total: $374.94

 

 

Year 4

XBL Gold, 4 Games

Total: $299.95

 

 

Year 5

XBL Gold, 4 Games, 1 Controller

Total: $374.95

 

 

Grand 5 Year Total: $2228.73

 

 

The similar comparison for PS4 can be made.

 

 

Console: $399

1 Yr PSN Plus: $49.99

Cost of New Game: $59.99

Cost of Controller: $59.99

 

 

Year 1 Total: $768.95

Year 2 Total: $289.95

Year 3 Total: $349.94

Year 4 Total: $289.95

Year 5 Total: $349.94

 

 

Grand 5 Year Total: $2048.73

 

 

Like I said at the beginning, my computer has quite a few non essential items (closed-loop water cooler, extra RAM, secondary SSD, 4 special function fans). Taking out non essential parts I have a $1400 rig. Then I spent extra money to get higher quality parts. The motherboard and GPU along could save you an additional $200-300 putting the build at an average sweet spot of $1200. (Not to mention my $100 keyboard... HEY I found out I like mechanical keyboards, leave me alone!). So a regular gaming build should put you at that $1100 price point. A budget build is around $800, although you may have to make addition upgrades in the 5 year period, so I'll tac on ~$200 in upgrades. An economy build can be as low as $350 (

) with upgrade availability, but you won't get as good of graphics as the next gen consoles. Personally I wouldn't recommend this.

 

 

To summarize:

[table=width: 600, class: grid]

5 Years

Cost

Games

Xbox One

$2228.73

20 Games

i2's PC

$2157.97

70 Games

PS4

$2048.73

20 Games

Balanced PC

$1500

70 games

Budget PC

$1300

70 games

[/table]

 

 

I think its an interesting discussion. In the end it really comes down to what you are looking for. In the end you will spend the same amount of money getting 4 games per year plus subscription fees on console as you will on a above average PC.

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You did not include the roughly 60 games you get for free with plus. I would also challenge your numbers on your pc game cost, we will stick to the 4 major titles even on PC costing $59.99... so minus the controller your five year spend is still quite a bit higher on PC and the average gamer will have to upgrade their video card at least once and possibly upgrade ram at least once in that period.

 

But otherwise not a bad analysis.

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I agree with Shane, plus depending on what system you buy, you also have what many games that were bought used as PS4 does support this feature and for a far lower cost then the $59.99, which would totally throw some of those numbers off. Then if you own a PS3 and a PS4 you are also getting free PSN games on the PS3 every month, so in the end it is likely that you could be getting more games for less then you would with the computer. It all depends on how you buy things and when. Example is new PS4 games during black Friday were about $40. Also the quality of the gaming you get on a PC is definitely impacted by the amount of money you spend to have better parts that make the game better and smoother. This is why the war of what is better never works, because it is all upon user preference and what you want to get out of gaming. Great thread and information here though, thank you for posting!

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I agree with Shane, plus depending on what system you buy, you also have what many games that were bought used as PS4 does support this feature and for a far lower cost then the $59.99, which would totally throw some of those numbers off. Then if you own a PS3 and a PS4 you are also getting free PSN games on the PS3 every month, so in the end it is likely that you could be getting more games for less then you would with the computer. It all depends on how you buy things and when. Example is new PS4 games during black Friday were about $40. Also the quality of the gaming you get on a PC is definitely impacted by the amount of money you spend to have better parts that make the game better and smoother. This is why the war of what is better never works, because it is all upon user preference and what you want to get out of gaming. Great thread and information here though, thank you for posting!

6 Month old PC titles go on sale for 15.99. After a year, its 7.49 or less. Console titles are NEVER that cheap used.

 

If you are buying console games used around release, its 5 dollars cheaper. I remember I bought Fallout New Vegas Ultimate Edition last year while I was working at gamestop for 7.49 on Steam. Someone came it to buy it for console and it was $25 used.

Edited by LunaticWolf
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You did not include the roughly 60 games you get for free with plus. I would also challenge your numbers on your pc game cost, we will stick to the 4 major titles even on PC costing $59.99... so minus the controller your five year spend is still quite a bit higher on PC and the average gamer will have to upgrade their video card at least once and possibly upgrade ram at least once in that period.

 

But otherwise not a bad analysis.

 

Certainly, the basis of the argument was based upon not buying games when they cost full price/at release. For someone like myself who only ever bought the following games on release night or within the first few months: MGS4, COD WAW, Black Ops 1 (release), Socom 4 (release), MW3 (release), Black Ops 2 (release), during the entire last gen console time period, buying games later at significantly discounted prices is a great bargain for me. What this has also allowed me to do is play other games I have never played before. It is so much easier to justify taking a risk on a game when it costs $5 than when it costs $20. I think my favorite example of this is the first Deus Ex. I never would have even tried to play that game on console, but since I got it for about $5 last Christmas, I found it became one of my favorite games all time.

 

An interesting thing to look at is my brother (LunaticWolf). He has over 300 games on Steam. He built his computer in 2008 for about $900. Just a few weeks ago, he upgraded to a new build that will last him until the next next gen consoles release. His 2008 build was a Core2Duo on a socket 775. His upgrade was a GTX 670 (I sold him mine ~$350), Haswell i5 & socket 1150 motherboard (~$360). A RAM change was not necessary. I don't see a change coming for RAM until they can justify needing to run DDR-5 on the motherboard.

 

In my opinion because the PS3 and 360 were such a great value for their performance in 2006, it was definitely a no-brainer, and the rise in console gaming in that period of time, the markets, specifically the system requirements for games, and the technology have slowed down. On average the past 4 generations of video cards are 10% improvement each generation. With this rate, I can justify using my GPU for another good 5 years. I can just speak from what I've heard from other people, but back in early 2000s, each iteration of generation of new tech was such a vast improvement from the previous generation, it became a rat-race to keep up so you could run the latest games. My brother was nearly able to get a GTX 265 to last nearly 5 years. In another thread on this forum a few months ago I showed Crysis 1 on PC in 2007. Graphics have not improved that much since then.

 

An interesting note is that with the advent of the required PSN Plus for multiplayer, this is essentially the cost of a average PC gamers video card ($250 for 5 years, $500 for 10 years). So actually the only difference in upgrades is the CPU/Mobo every 5 years, but that total cost is very close to that of the money you will spend on the two consoles in those same 10 years.

 

If we expand the previous analysis to accommodate a 10-year period we get:

 

He owns 325 games on PC. If we figure my cost per game: $400/70 games = ~$6 per game, and expand that to his games: 325 games * $6 = $2000.

 

To summarize:

[table=width: 600, class: grid]

10 Years

Cost

Games

Bro's PC

$3600

325 Games

Xbox One + Xbox 2

$4000

48 Games

PS4 + PS5

$3800

48 Games + 120 Games

[/table]

 

I did not know that PSN Plus gives you games, that really gives PS4 a value that X1 doesn't have. Shane, is there a list somewhere where I can see the types of games they are providing for this? Giving games on the store does make me wonder how much of that is to get people used to downloading games off of the store, but that's neither here nor there. I would like to note that if I ever did get a console for this gen, I would most likely get a PS4. I see no reason to get an X1.

 

I agree with Shane, plus depending on what system you buy, you also have what many games that were bought used as PS4 does support this feature and for a far lower cost then the $59.99, which would totally throw some of those numbers off. Then if you own a PS3 and a PS4 you are also getting free PSN games on the PS3 every month, so in the end it is likely that you could be getting more games for less then you would with the computer. It all depends on how you buy things and when. Example is new PS4 games during black Friday were about $40. Also the quality of the gaming you get on a PC is definitely impacted by the amount of money you spend to have better parts that make the game better and smoother. This is why the war of what is better never works, because it is all upon user preference and what you want to get out of gaming. Great thread and information here though, thank you for posting!

 

I find this point interesting because when someone makes this point in multiplayer situations I don't agree. By better you would be referring to features like volumetric smoke, draw distance, etc. Especially in games that console players are used to, these visual effects are removed from multiplayer for balance. This type of issue is quite apparent on BF4 on PS4, which is a PC port.

 

r6b6xZg.gif

 

If a player was using this bush for cover, they would be exposed at distance, but hidden only when they are close. This is due to limitations of the console.

 

Smoother is something closely tied to better because as you crank settings up you can sacrifice this on some systems. However, with G-Sync coming out. This will no longer be an issue because frame rate drops obvious anymore.

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The other day I came to a realization when I ran into several young gamers. I asked them what games they are playing and if they are getting the new consoles. Their response blew me away. They responded, "nah, I'm more into PC games right now". One must ask themselves why is this? Outside of COD YouTube celebrities. What games and platforms are these YouTube idols playing? The MOST popular YT Channel (fact) is Pewdiepie (PC Games). The top 6 channels are primarily PC gamers. See for yourself: http://vidstatsx.com...gaming-channels . I can think of a few COD YT celebs who have moved to PC gaming (Seananners, Gunnsforhire, etc). Because of Minecraft and YouTube, the next generation of gamers are growing up playing PC games.

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