PC Power?

I know a guy who has spent thousands of pounds upgrading his PC just to play games like 'company of heroes' (where you do nothing but click a mouse) because of the graphics and is not interested in anything differant at all. Is it worth upgrading a PC ever few months just to make the graphics shinier? Or just spend a few hundred every 4/5 years on a console and see lots of amazing games of differant types.

The PC can have mods and the internet but nowadays even the wii has the internet and the PS3 can have user mods, the next generation will make bigger emphasis and where do PCs go from there apart from making helmets and floors super shiny?

I'm perfectly fine with what my PC has.

IBM ThinkCentre M52 8113-DCU
Intel Pentium 4 (630) 3.00GHz 64-bit
1GB RAM
Creative X-Fi Xmod (USB Sound)
Intel GMA 950 Graphics
Mac OS X Leopard
80GB SATA
DVD Dual Layer Burner
Gigabit Ethernet
54/125 Wifi
and that's about it.

I've given up on PC gaming, mostly because the system requirements are ridiculous. While you mentioned upgrading for the graphics not being worth it, it's not even worth it to upgrade in order to meet the system requirements. Every time I upgrade, my upgrade is only useful for about six months, and then I get decimated. Decimated as in falling far below minimum requirements. My computer, from 2005, is admittably a budget PC, but it has very acceptable graphics power. I could play games from that time perfectly well. After around a year, however, my computer was no longer above any minimum requirements.

The technology is just moving along WAY too fast! Right now, to get a video card that will play current games and upcoming games for the next year will run me around $200. I don't have that kind of money to throw around yearly. For comparison, my family bought a Pentium 2/450 in 1999 and I managed to play games on it up until almost 2003, without ever upgrading the video card. (We did upgrade the ram to 320 MB, but that barely cost anything) And it's some 16 megabyte piece of junk card. I've yet to put down any dollars toward a video card upgrade, and probably won't because now even my processor isn't good enough. I might as well just hold out for a few more years and then buy something new, and spend a few years after that catching up on everything I missed, and enjoying it just as much as I would have if I wasted my money on upgrades.

For that reason, I've stopped buying PC games (the last new game I bought was Star Wars Battlefront 2 almost two and a half years ago) and if I do play a game on here it's either an emulator, a very old game I used to play on my P2/450, or an indie title which has very low system requirements in comparison to mainstream PC games.

Well, I'm sporting Linux so having cutting edge stuff isn't worth it...there isn't support for most brand new stuff anyway.

That being said, processor speed has actually leveled off but there is the issue of how many "cores" you have.

RAM is pretty cheap right now. I can get 4 gig or RAM for under $100.

As far as games? I feel the game experience is better than having the greatest looking game. Graphics are nice, but gameplay is better. I don't know how much of an issue "the newest video cards" are/will be if Vista remains disliked as much as it is....you can't run DX10 under XP.

Only thing I'm not happy with my new PC is the GFX card and sound...

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ @ 2.3MHz
2GB of 800MHz DDR2
Gigabyte Nvidia 8600 with 512MB of GDDR2 <- Want a 8800 !!!
250 GB Samsung .......... 7200rpm, 16MB cache, Sata2
Shitty 8ch onboard audio.... <- want some Yamaha istead of it
Runs XP corporate, sometimes MS-DOS and Win98SE

At least I was able to beat Crysis on normal on it, so its not that bad PC

Surely everyone on this site agrees with me though, that brilliant graphics doesn't equal a brilliant game?

It's a shame more people don't have that attitude.

End of the day, if the game is genuinely good then you should get just as much enjoyment playing it on it's minimum required system as on a quad core powerhouse of a machine.

Personally I only have one PC that's really geared for gaming (the rest are workstations) and it's only a 3.4Ghz P4 HT, 1GB RAM and 512MB ATI EAX1800XT, does me just fine.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by mick_aka

It's a shame more people don't have that attitude.

End of the day, if the game is genuinely good then you should get just as much enjoyment playing it on it's minimum required system as on a quad core powerhouse of a machine.

Personally I only have one PC that's really geared for gaming (the rest are workstations) and it's only a 3.4Ghz P4 HT, 1GB RAM and 512MB ATI EAX1800XT, does me just fine.

---

You could do so much with that machine.

Not "only a", it's "a great". ;)

I use a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 (630 Prescott Core), and they are 64-bit processors, and can run OS X Leopard great.

My PC is feeling its age now, put it together 7 years ago! 1.7ghz and 512meg is a bit limiting when your editing 500 megabyte images. Poor thing slows down to a crawl and crashes quite a bit :(

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by sonicwatcher6969

Surely everyone on this site agrees with me though, that brilliant graphics doesn't equal a brilliant game?

---

Crysis is pretty eye candy game, and IMHO it plays GREAT !!! I loved every single second of that game... except last stages where I had to enjoy 10 FPS or less during intense alien fighting !!!!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by sonicwatcher6969

Surely everyone on this site agrees with me though, that brilliant graphics doesn't equal a brilliant game?

---

Of course. But apparently your mate thinks differently -- all he's really doing is tweaking up his system to get more enjoyment out of a game. Even though it is apparently 'no more than clicking a mouse'.

PCs are great for strategy games--both real time and turn-based--simulation games, etc. Basically anything that absolutely requires a mouse to be playable. Luckily, these games don't require a ridiculous amount of graphical power.

For everything else I stick to consoles now.

People have a tendency to make much bigger fuzz than needed about how often you need to upgrade. I generally upgrade every 3 years and that strategy has worked great for me so far. Sometimes maybe I can't run the very latest games at ultra-high settings, but that hardly cripples the enjoyment you get.

The overall strength of PC gaming lies in the handful of titles that live on through years upon years upon years from rich community support. I mean, even the Doom 1 and 2 communities are still flourishing with new content. That's what really makes you feel like you're getting bang for your buck, instead of buying some $60 AAA-hyped title you just shelf after a couple of weeks.

I never played games on a computer and probably won't start anytime soon. I buy video game systems like the Xbox 360 and Wii to play games on.

Quote:

---

The overall strength of PC gaming lies in the handful of titles that live on through years upon years upon years from rich community support.

---

Good point. Some of my absolute favorite PC strategy games come from Paradoxx Interactive (Swedish company that makes historical games) and they get deep community support for years on end.

However, the computer retro scene is non-existent. Maybe for Amiga or something like that theres a small scene, but if we're talking about DOS/Windows it doesn't seem to exist.