PC Gaming, too expensive!! - Page 3

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Lets not forget the real problem is the operating systems. Each operating system gets bigger and bigger leaving the old systems unable to run games they should.

My girlfriends computer runs Sam and Max season 1. Sam and Max required a 1.5 ghz proc, 512 meg of ram, and 32 meg video card for xp/vista. Her basic cheap dell has win2k a 900mhz celeron processor and 256 meg of ram. She bought a PCI graphics video card for 60 bucks. Her system is 7 years old.

It stutters here and there (not a big deal in adventure games). The voices are smooth and the loading takes a bit of time. Other than that it runs fine at 800x600. She probably represents a large untapped gamers market. They will buy games (thank you Half Price books for 7 dollar games), but only if they can play them.

You can buy the cheapest dell computer with windows xp for about 360 dollars. 1 gig of ram, a 1.6 ghz celeron, integrated video and sound. This means a home user only needs to buy a video card for about 60 dollars. Simple instructions on how to uninstall the drivers and put in the pci card would help. Funny thing is you can get a better computer for 428 dollars (1.8 core 2 duo and 256 mb video card) installed for cheaper but it has vista and still only 1 gig of memory.

So a gaming machine of about 450 dollars with tax and shipping. Also almost none of the hassle of scratch building your own system (which most people are afraid of).

I still find it ironic that Warcraft 3 is still played more by my group than the newest rts and part of that is because we can play it on old laptops.

Look, I'm reasonably knowledgeable about computers and even I like to just install a game and have it just work. It's just that when you want to get the extra mile on performance or image quality you will have to invest time in it and that's ok as long as the plug and play experience is acceptable in terms of quality and performance. Maybe they should just make the "automatic configuration" button the default choice, and only show graphics options when people want to see them. Most do that already with advanced options but I'm also talking about screen resolution, etc. How hard can it be to detect the native resolution of an LCD screen?

Been hanging around Wingding? [/if you don't know, don't ask]

Wouldnt this, in the long term be kind of good for PC sales in terms of upgrading? If they keep just porting everything over from consoles, I suppose the graphics really wont be getting any better, therefore no need to upgrade the PC. I think thats the primary concept, haters of PC gaming don't get, you don't HAVE to upgrade, just tweak the graphics to the same level. They seem to ignore this fact, Console graphics = dont get any better over their lifespan PC=graphics keep increasing all the time. But you arent required to utilize these graphics, you could run your PC like a console and maintain current gen graphics throughout its life. My p4 system (2004)6800GT(2005) lasted me until i decided to build a new PC in january (750 bucks, not exactly breaking the bank here). I was never at any point frustrated with my ability to play games over this 4 year time period, graphics still looked better than ps2 or xbox. If you talk to people who feel the need to shell out 5-600 dollars every 6 months on their PC, of course you would get that type of idea that pc gaming is expenisive. Fact is ITS NOT necessary.

The funny thing is I am sure alot of the people complaining about PC gaming being expensive are the same ones who have 10-20k worth of home theatre equipment, and probably spend thousands more upgrading that every year, because super THX dolby digital super man sound 20.0 was released.

Thats the thing, nowadays if you want to enjoy the graphics of the nex gen system, you need an HD tv and theres your evening out. Although I am willing to bet the primary party involved in hating pc gaming are people in the 10-18 age group, because mom and dad already have the HDTV and they got the xbox, ps3, or wii for christmas.

I actually think it's less expensive now to put together a gaming PC than it has been in the past. Due to competition CPU and GPU prices have fallen incredibly recently. The amount of bang you can get for your buck in the last few months is staggering compared to less than two years ago.

I think people are seeing consoles as an alternative to PC gaming at the moment while they are capable of doing similar graphics at a lower price but in the next few years I predict people will come back to the PC as it moves ahead of the consoles with progress in visuals. The graphics in PS3 and Xbox are equivalent to 7800/x1900 or something which I already consider old compared to what DX10 cards can do.

In the next few years no one is going to be getting really excited about graphics in console games. Anyone interested in the technological advancement of games is going to be looking to the PC. Look back to the first half of this decade when DX9 cards and pixel shaders were coming in. I remember a lot more excitement in the gaming community surrounding games like Doom 3, Far Cry, Half Life 2, FEAR than any PS2 game (Grand Theft Auto aside).