Gaming on PC vs. Gaming on consoles . . . a thoughtful and measured discussion.

My PC is about six years old. I have a 1070 in it. I’m playing RDR2 on it right now. 60fps at Med/High settings, so significantly better than any of the consoles thanks to the better framerate. (I already played it on XoneX.) It’s great.

I choose console for almost everything nowadays. That wasn’t the case in the past, but with so many good exclusives on PlayStation and Switch, the portability of the Switch, and the PS4 Pro being competitive enough with my PCs to not care too much about the graphic bells and whistles I might be missing, the PC is definitely always a second choice.

I do like the Humble Monthly though which is where I’ve picked up almost all my PC games for the last three years or so. I have a GTX1070 and a Core i7 6700 so it’s not like my PC is outdated either.

I also very much appreciate @Guap’s comments on how stuff just plain works. That’s still one of the best things about consoles that I’ve come to have so little time for on PC. Tweaking settings and trying to figure out why I’m still getting fucking tearing in a game when I have a GTX1070 and a G-Sync monitor is maddening.

You contradict yourself here. The 1070 itself came out three years ago, so even if the rest of the PC was already there and working, you added a $400 GPU to it later on, which isn’t a great argument for the budget side of things.

Telefrog needed that video card upgrade anyway for Microsoft Word, so it doesn’t count.

So I appreciate the budget discussions, and welcome them. And if you choose one platform over the other and don’t even buy the other one, I completely understand that. I’ve made that choice with XBox over PS.

However, the original intent was to ask people who had BOTH … why you would choose the PC version over console. What I’m hearing is control scheme and mods and multi screen gaming, which are fine answers. But if you have both, and it’s the same game, wondering why PC over console (I think buying both versions doesn’t really count, we are going with a Sophie’s Choice here). :)

The 1070 was an add-on in early 2017. The card from my previous PC was the one I used before that, so yes, there was an upgrade cost. If I was still using the old 970, I’d still be able to play RDR2 on it, but likely at 30-40fps, so about equal to the XoneX.

That said, XoneX also came out in 2017, so if you had an OG Xbox One, your choice was to upgrade, or stick with the slower console.

RDR2 can go blow itself. Everyone seems intent that it’s oh so demanding. It’s not. A GTX 770 is fine, and a 1060 is recommended.

nVidia recommends a 2080ti? Big surprise! In other news GM recommends you buy an Escalade, Apple recommends you buy a Macbook Pro, and Bank of America recommends you buy a new house for exactly the max you can afford assuming your life goes perfect for the next 20 years.

Being able to move and instantly change directions without deadzones and acceleration makes it better than a gamepad all by itself. Having far more inputs available is icing on the cake. But even beyond all of that, I refuse to play an FPS that requires quick, accurate aiming with a thumb stick unless I have no other choice. Mouse aiming isn’t just “fine”; it’s the gold standard for FPS control.

Not for me. I don’t like it. It’s a subjective opinion, and you are welcome to it.

Along with what you posted we have also said cost of games as they are usually on sale more often for PC than console. For example I can get Soul Calibur 6 for $12 right now for PC, the best I could find was $30 at gamestop but I couldn’t tell if it was a used copy or not.

Secondly people have mentioned that often times our consoles are attached to the same TV the rest of the family uses so I have more access and privacy to games on my PC vs. a console.

PC games are cheaper, the hardware is much higher end (if you choose to pay for that) enabling better graphics at higher framerates, you don’t have to pay for multiplayer, I don’t share Guap’s enthusiasm for gamepads, and I enjoy the tweaking.

There’s a reason people aren’t winning Quake tournaments with thumb sticks.

I’ve had issues with motion sickness with mouse+keyboard now. I used to use it all the time with no problems. If I play with a controller, no issues. I’ve pretty much switched to an Xbox controller exclusively on PC.

It’s definitely subjective too. Watch NiceWigg play Apex on PC with a controller. Top 150 player in the world in that game on PC. Xbox controller. @Penny_Dreadful, who plays Quake tournaments in 2019?

1998 called, it wants its reference back. :)

Give up RDR2 on my Ultrawide monitor? No thanks! It looks great on my 65" plasma but I prefer the in your face wrap around display.

Zero problems getting it to run out of the box. And that’s on an archlinux setup using VFIO to run windows under a VM. Obviously though I am a tech head and the complete opposite of people in this thread who don’t want to tweak and start to panic if something goes wrong.

I think a lot of this boils down to displays and comfortable seating. I have an amazing office chair that I can sit in all day every day and never feel uncomfortable plus the ultrawide gsync display means all the advantages of the couch don’t apply to me. That and I usually but not always prefer M&K so that rules out the living room as well.

But steam link means I can just walk into the living room and pick up the game if I wanted to.

This doesn’t even get into the library differences. On a PC I can play almost everything I want, with a few notable exceptions that the PS4 covers.

Why are we even talking about RDR2? Don’t you know that Age of Empires 2 DE is coming out next week? Seriously, good games comes out more frequently on PC then any console.

Dominions, Pathfinder, Age of Empires 2 DE, Iron Harvest, Battletech, all PC exclusives. And so many of the will have the option to include mods.

And, that ignores the fact that I can usually play any game from the past 2 decades that is available.

There are few exclusive games on Xbox or PS4 that seem interesting to me.

I was just covering that! I do like my occasional AAA game but most of the time I am playing oddball indy titles like Autonauts.

Sorry, I just re-read it.

But, a few people seemed focus on it, so I meant my comment to be more general.

I was editing it while you posted, so you probably never got the chance. But I fully agree.

It’s not free if you are paying for it, and it gets taken away when you are not.