Upgradable Consoles are Just PCs for Peasants

RaikuFA

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Neonsilver said:
RaikuFA said:
Considering the guy I went to had a business that was fixing PC's, I think it's safe to say he wasn't doing it for free. But $200 for just a diagnostic is outrageous.
I missed the diagnostic bit when I read your other post. I agree that is to much, I can understand if someone asks some money for it, but 200$ is too much.
I don't mind paying but nowhere that much.
 

votemarvel

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Jacked Assassin said:
Even if the consoles were to somehow become PCs I doubt the consoles would somehow have the same problems seen with cheating like in Dark Souls Sequels. Or bad ports from Consoles to PCs by 3rd Party Companies.
A big part of the problem is that consoles almost are PCs.

There is honestly very little that I do on my PC that I couldn't also do on my 360 or Xbox One.

Browse the web, listen to music while gaming (very poorly done with the One), do basic office work. Gaming of course. All things that can be done with the 360 and One. I think burning a music CD was the last thing I did on PC that my consoles can't do.

And that's the problem. Consoles are a hop, skip, and a jump away from being a PC now, at this very moment. The only real advantage they still have is that the machine is the same its entire life, it'll run the games released for it for its whole life cycle.

Start adding in hardware upgrades, and you know at some point a publisher/developer will insist that an upgrade is needed for their game, and you no longer have a console. You have a PC with really heavy restrictions on it.
 

Zhit

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Happy gamer the top three platforms. The issue I see with upgradable consoles--splitting the player base. When playing Halo or CoD you never worry about FPS and cheaters. Everyone is on the same platform. Everyone gets the same FPS. Everyone is using the same control method. The playing field is as level as it can be.

So what happens when the upgraded consoles are in the mix? Will a top-10 player on an original console always find himself losing to another top-10 player on the upgraded box because of FPS advantages/controller response?
 

Rebel_Raven

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Callate said:
Rebel_Raven said:
With the way graphics are jumping, and the demands seem to be going to not play PC games at console levels it's bothersome.
Have they made universal GPUs, or are there still some divisions like games that will only work on AMC, or Nvidia?

If I were to build a PC I'd assuredly want to make it strong enough for it to be futureproofed fora good long time, but I'm too paranoid to think that'll work.
Hypothetically, comparable AMD and Nvidia video cards should run games about equally well. And the manufacturers try to play leap frog with one another, so neither is in the lead for long.

Realistically, though, there's something of a trend for games to favor one or the other (as apparently happened with The Witcher 3 and Tomb Raider), though often its only apparent with proprietary software that has to do a lot of calculations, like hair and certain kinds of physics.

And (while I may be biased)- my sense is that Nvidia has been winning this war for a while. Occasionally AMD wins on price, especially where options that integrate graphics and CPU on a single chip are concerned, but Nvidia tends to be cooler, faster, more stable-ly, and with lower power demands.

Still, I haven't heard of a game that out-and-out refused to run on one or the other, beyond regular system requirements, in quite some time.

As far as a "futureproof" PC goes, I do think it's possible; I even think I've mostly succeeded for about seven years. But I did replace my video card and add some more memory at some point, and at 2.93GHz, my CPU is no longer quite up to the newest and shiniest. Still, it's had a pretty good run.
Eh, maybe I'm still just a bit traumatized since I felt like I had those graphical issues, but to be fair, it was Dos games in the 80's.
It's actually good to know I'm wrong about games only working with certain graphics cards.

How much did those upgrades run you, and could you run games on higher quality settings? Roughly, speaking? I mean a lot of the point is to not just run games, but run them well.

JUMBO PALACE said:
Rebel_Raven said:
Kinda sorta tongue in cheek. Mostly joking, though. I just am not a huge fan of pc gaming, but I recognize it's virtues, and have some envy. I've tried it off, and on, honestly. Had enough bad experiences to move on. My laptop's too weak to play minecraft. Torchlight had display issues. Some MMOs like Warframe were just too messy to mess with. Granted I'm on a laptop, here, and it's not an alienware or something like that.

With the way graphics are jumping, and the demands seem to be going to not play PC games at console levels it's bothersome.
Have they made universal GPUs, or are there still some divisions like games that will only work on AMC, or Nvidia?

If I were to build a PC I'd assuredly want to make it strong enough for it to be futureproofed fora good long time, but I'm too paranoid to think that'll work.
Well to answer your question about GPUs, there are no games that are tied to either of the two manufacturers (AMD and Nvidia), though sometimes a developer will partner with one of them to utilize their unique software. Nvidia has Physx for particle physics and AMD has Tress Fx for hair quality. But even when a partnerhsip does take place the game runs on all hardware. I've never heard of a game only being able to run on AMD or Nvidia GPUs.

And as I said, if you build a quality PC now there's no reason it can't last quite some time. The only reason to upgrade is if your games aren't running up to your specification. Right now, since you typically play on console that's probably 1080 or 720p at 25-30 fps. If you are happy with that you can use the same GPU for just as long as a console cycle if not longer. But typically I think a lot of people get used to and really enjoy cranking up the settings and playing at 60+ fps, so they upgrade more frequently. It's all up to you. No one is forcing any PC player to upgrade components and your components don't just stop working once a new GPU comes out. That's honestly part of the fun. Getting excited about new hardware and then opening up your rig to tinker around, change parts, fuss with your cable management; it all leads to a platform that is uniquely yours. You get attached to it in a way you don't with consoles. If something happened like a flood or power surge and my PC was ruined I would be devastated. An xbox is an xbox but this PC is mine. Maybe that's silly but that's how I feel about it.
Must have been some dumb rumor I heard somewhere a while ago, I guess, about games being prone to not working with some graphics cards. God to know I'm wrong on that.

I'd probably want to be able to run stuff at high settings reliably, which feels like the point of getting a PC when I build. Getting kneecapped and having to run things at console levels would kinda defeat the whole purpose, larger game selection aside.

A connection to your PC isn't silly at all. I totally understand it. I've been there with some older computers of mine, among other things. I think it's a good thing to feel.
 

TheMysteriousGX

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Rebel_Raven said:
How much did those upgrades run you, and could you run games on higher quality settings? Roughly, speaking? I mean a lot of the point is to not just run games, but run them well.
. Well, when looking at upgrades, specifically upgrades to put you ahead of the console curve, I've found you're looking at, say, a $300+ video card, $50-$100 of RAM, a ~$150 dollar CPU, and occasionally an upgraded motherboard, which hopefully is compatible with your old components (otherwise you buy those all over again).

I, personally, am not convinced it shakes out to being cheaper than a current-gen console unless you're comfortable with lagging behind occasionally.
 

Callate

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Rebel_Raven said:
Eh, maybe I'm still just a bit traumatized since I felt like I had those graphical issues, but to be fair, it was Dos games in the 80's.
It's actually good to know I'm wrong about games only working with certain graphics cards.
Ooh, did you ever have to convince your computer that EMS memory was XMS, or vice versa? 'Cuz that sure was fun. [/heavy sarcasm]

We've come a ways since having to choose between sixteen colors and high resolution or 256 colors and terrible resolution, or even (mostly) Voodoo cards and OpenGL versus DirectX. Can't say I miss it much.

How much did those upgrades run you, and could you run games on higher quality settings? Roughly, speaking? I mean a lot of the point is to not just run games, but run them well.
Well, y'know, it's always kind of relative. My current card is a GeForce GTX 650 Ti, and I think it ran me about $150 at the time. It still runs most things; the last significant test I had of its capabilities was that it ran Bioshock Infinite at High (though not Ultra) settings at a comfortable frame rate. I can run GTA V at about medium settings, though I suspect at 1080p that's still not too far from what one would expect from current-gen consoles.

Conversely, memory is pretty cheap. Expanding from 3 GB to 9 GB (my motherboard uses a weird memory configuration) I believe cost about $60.

But at this point, my CPU (and in turn, motherboard) is the real millstone around the system's neck. I put together my system at the first generation of i7 chips, and I think that was a pretty good move. But recent games like The Witcher 3 and Metal Gear Solid V really do demand well over 3 GHz.

While PC gamers are often loath to admit it, the need to keep games in parity with the abilities of consoles does pay some dividends; high-end hardware doesn't become obsolete nearly as quickly as it once might have. If one's video card can play a game at 1920x1080 at something ridiculous like 250 frames per second, and in three years it can only play at 110 frames per second... Not exactly a loss. (And for much this reason, I'm somewhat skeptical that wide adoption of 4K or higher screens is going to happen any time soon.)

My hope at present is that when the GeForce 1080s become available again, I will have made space in my budget for a new system with a nice, fast, four-core Intel chip and one of those riding beneath it... And with that in hand, to comfortably ride out another five to seven years.
 

RedRockRun

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The console market is so bloody corrupt. This isn't about preference. There's no 1:1 correspondence between PC's and consoles, so I wish the tired-out "PC Gamers vs Console Gamers" argument could simply be replaced by "PC and Console Gamers vs the Console Market". Look at the hardware going into consoles. They make a big deal out of 1 gig storage, for example, yet how long have PC owners had access to that and not even PC gamers but all PC users? Also, we're supposed to believe that console generations are some natural, organic growth of the industry, spurred on by the development of new technology? Please. It's all inter-company collusion. There's an agreement somewhere between Microsoft and Sony for consoles to be developed with comparable hardware and planned obsolescence at around the same price. How could it be coincidence that both companies release consoles around the same time with around the same specs which are good for around the same number of years? I could maybe buy it if the Xbox and Playstation were both using state of the art hardware, grabbing processors and video cards hot off Intel and AMD's lines, but they're not.
 

deadish

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Satinavian said:
deadish said:
I was not looking for a build, I was looking for information. A run down of the general structure of PC parts and important characteristics was what I was looking for - even pointing me to the relevant websites would have helped.

Parts are useless, I don't live the in the US. Part availability and price will vary. I wanted to make my own decisions with regards to cost/benefit.
I don't know, what happened there, but the internet is full of not very nice people.

OK : general rundown

--snip--
Thanks.

That was 2-3 years ago. After getting nothing from the computer forum, I decided to go solo wandering on Google. Somehow I ended up reading on duel channel RAM and how you need to connect it in alternating slots, CPU paste ... at that point I threw in the towel and just bought an Alienware. LOL

Unfortunately I got a faulty video card ... long story short, after a month of debating with my local DELL tech support, they finally relented and replaced the card. Work OK since then though - barring Windows problems and trouble with AMD's drivers.

Heard about the RX480 recently (courtesy of Youtube recommendations) ... I'm tempted to replace the R9 270 I'm using now. Assuming I can get an AMD stock card and it would fit into the smaller that normal Alienware case - price and power supply permitting; should be OK on the power supply front.

Replacing simply things like GPUs and hard drives are probably the limit for me at the moment. Building a PC from scratch ... the burden of knowledge is too high.
 

Eri

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FalloutJack said:
Next time, report your opinion without the overdone PC master race joke. It's getting to the point that people will probably just ignore you because of the attitude it conveys. Like, I know that it's not suppose to be serious, but it still reminds me of people who talk out of their ass. And when I meet such people, their voice may as well just be farts in the wind, for all I care. You should probably drop it if you want to be taken seriously.
Telling someone to drop it to conform to your way or you'll ignore them is the exact thing you are complaining that the "elitists" are doing.
 

IamLEAM1983

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Aug 22, 2011
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Madmatty said:
Upgrades, updates, install times, all these things are slowly defeating the purpose of consoles am I right?
You are. I just bought myself a PS4, and I'm well aware that I got myself an underpowered games-and-streaming exclusive "quasi-PC" for 350 bucks. I didn't have two thou to spare, so the lofty heights of constant 60 FPS and mouse-and-keyboard gaming are going to elude me for a while longer.

As for the usual "Two thou? Where I'm at, I can get a PC that'll crush any console for three hundred bucks!", I'd have to retort that this only applies in the US. In Canada, where everything's imported and taxes are a *****, a future-proof machine costs two thousand dollars at the most. Yes, there's affordable rigs at lower price points, but they're not going to last more than a few years.

I like to wait a *long* time between rigs, personally. The one I'm currently using slid down the slope from being a beastly gaming rig in 2005 to a jalopy by 2016's standards over ten years. That's ten years with only the occasional PSU swap and one GPU replacement due to wear and tear.
 

Epyc Wynn

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A laptop costs too much and may not be reliable with gaming. Consoles innately are and can be far more trusted to run properly and not require an immense depth of technical knowledge to use and put together like a laptop forces you to for gaming and if you're like me emulating older games. An upgradable console sounds great so long as upgrading it is kept simple and understandable with a reasonable price, because the whole point of consoles is they're easily understandable compared to a PC gaming rig and much more affordable.
 

Yopaz

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Rebel_Raven said:
Right, coz I want what ever upgrade I get for my console to be obsolete in months, cost as much as a console, and so many other flaws, and I've got to worry if my console can play the latest games at full power or not. No thanks.

I'll leave that to the
<youtube=aDMsGl_XxTk>

Anywho, the article makes sense.
PCs don't become obsolete after a few months. If you buy the best possible computer possible right now then it will take a few months before it is no longer the best possible PC you can get, but it will last you a long time. I bought a midrange gaming computer in early 2011 and it still plays the newest games. If I limit myself to 720p I can easily get 50-70 fps on most new games (which is more than the recently released consoles can with most games).

It is also a useful tool for my work and I need a computer anyway so some of the added cost can be justified as it is more than an entertainment system. Also PC games are generally a tiny bit cheaper than their console counterparts (about $10 I think) so over the lifetime of a PC it may even out depending on how many games you buy. Also considering compatibility I can play games going back as far as the PS1/N64 era to the current era with no issues, even further if I want to tinker with it so I can use it for the equivalent of at least 4 console generations.

There are lots of reasons why I still buy consoles though. Exclusives being the major selling point, but as I visit my family during the holidays they are easier to carry with you (especially the Wii U which allows off-screen support so I don't need a TV on all titles). They are made to work with sitting in the couch which makes that a lot easier than doing it with my computer (this argument is slowly loosing ground as this gets easier on PCs, but I'll still use it).

A really good argument is this:
RaikuFA said:
There's just one huge issue: PC gatekeeping. It seems PC users LOVE to look down on anyone who wants to get into PC gaming but isn't tech savvy.

Case in point: my computer has been broken for a year and a half. Why can't I get it fixed? Cause I don't know what's wrong and the only guy who'll look at it wants $200 just to see what's wrong.
Fixing a computer can be time consuming and thus it gets expensive. I personally wouldn't expect to pay less than $100 for a diagnosis on what was wrong myself because it can quickly turn into 6 hours of work. Because consoles are locked down there's a limited number of things that can go wrong, so far there hasn't been made viruses (as far as I know) and you can't install software that interferes with other software, but if that could happen it would be completely on the manufacture's side and they would be responsible to fix it.

PCs are better than consoles, no doubt about it, but there are still room for preferences. Seriously, console gamers, drop all your arguments and your flawed reasoning and just say "Well, I prefer consoles", it's not bulletproof, but arguing against it just makes the other guy sound like an asshole.
 

Dollabillyall

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The future of computing is a central hub with access nodes. One computer residing in your fuse closet driving your tv, desktop, gaming, heating, kitchen appliances and everything else accesable from tablets, phones etc...
It's also going to suck shit when one thing breaks.
 

Veylon

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Dollabillyall said:
The future of computing is a central hub with access nodes. One computer residing in your fuse closet driving your tv, desktop, gaming, heating, kitchen appliances and everything else accessible from tablets, phones etc...
It's also going to suck shit when one thing breaks.
I kind of like the idea myself. It can afford to be big, clunky, and accessible because it won't be moving anywhere or needing to look presentable. It can sit in your basement in a positive-pressure filtered-air enclosure and work reliably. So much effort and money goes into making things sleek and pretty and it'd be nice to ditch that. Some people are already building these kinds of things on their own and it's not as hard or expensive as it sounds.

But, yeah, upgradeable consoles are a terrible idea. The whole point of the things is to not have run the rat race. I can only imagine the aggravation as parents try to buy their kids games, only to be stymied because you need at least the purple GFX chip and red RAM to play it, only to find out that their system has the blue and the green. And that's the simple, color-coded example. It'll be double hell if they have guess whether the Korbat VT9000XE that the game wants is in the ballpark of the Nilmad 68ti07 that they've got installed. Either way, the $60 game won't be returnable.
 

Satinavian

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Dollabillyall said:
The future of computing is a central hub with access nodes. One computer residing in your fuse closet driving your tv, desktop, gaming, heating, kitchen appliances and everything else accesable from tablets, phones etc...
It's also going to suck shit when one thing breaks.
Unlikely.

Way too much data transfer needed for everything. (Bandwide and latency are nowadays important limits). Not enough gained from having more space. Several persons using the same device raise security and account concerns. Most household appliances don't have important things to communicate anyway (that why all those "internet of things"-articles are full of utterly stupid examples).

It certainly can be done, but i don't see the appeal.
 

cikame

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I'm assuming you'll never see an 'upgradable' console, one where you can purchase new parts and replace them yourself, Sony put out their rules for how the "Neo" would work and how developers could use it, it'll have to work like this but you can only take it so far before older games stop being supported. It's a new console, but all future games have to work on the PS4 and the Neo, i'm skeptical at how many publishers are going to fund the extra development required to make the PS4 version run well, and how much priority will be put on the potentially better looking Neo versions, if you want to have better texture quality for your Neo version would you put them on the disc or have users download them? 3 or 4 updated consoles down the line will The Witcher 3 still work, or will the firmware updates and hardware changes start affecting older titles?

We'll only know these things years into the future, but one thing you can be certain of, console makers don't want to spend money keeping everything supported if they can get away with it, and publishers don't want to give developers more budget and time to deal with the technical challenge that will be making multiple versions of a game work well on all the console versions it's supposed to.
 

Dollabillyall

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Satinavian said:
Dollabillyall said:
The future of computing is a central hub with access nodes. One computer residing in your fuse closet driving your tv, desktop, gaming, heating, kitchen appliances and everything else accesable from tablets, phones etc...
It's also going to suck shit when one thing breaks.
Unlikely.

Way too much data transfer needed for everything. (Bandwide and latency are nowadays important limits). Not enough gained from having more space. Several persons using the same device raise security and account concerns. Most household appliances don't have important things to communicate anyway (that why all those "internet of things"-articles are full of utterly stupid examples).

It certainly can be done, but i don't see the appeal.
What latency problem is going to arise from having a computer in the hall closet and a TV 4 meters away from it? Is plugging an HDMI cable into a wall socket any different to have an HDMI cable running from your TV box to the TV? I mean sure theres a few extra meters of cable but I doubt that it's going to completely wreck the stream that travelled hundreds of miles to get there in the first place. Also, theres plenty reason to have certain appliances accessable from a remote location... Oven preheating, coffee making, securing the alcohol from children, a dynamic grocery list... that kind of stuff I can see being useful in the kitchen. Then there is (what already exists and has a growing userbase) stuff like smoke detectors, heating, alarm systems and energy consumption monitoring.

The benefit from having all this connected to a central node is that you only need one big and powerful computer doing all the work instead of having a house filled with medium sized ones that take up a lot of resources that stand to have demand outstrip supply.
 

deadish

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One look at the title ... decided not to read it.

So Escapist is back on the clickbait train I take it.

As for 2.0 consoles, either they get a market or they fail. It's nothing to do with us. It's the console manufacturer's problem.

If you have already bought the PS4, like millions of other people, you will have plenty of games to come. What developer is going to ignore such a huge market?
 

Hiddelgreyk

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Kyogissun said:
Upgradeable consoles runs entirely counter intuitive to the lone reason I have fallen back in love with consoles...

I Just Want To Play Video Games
So do I.
I got Terraria on PSVita, and after "finishing" the stuff that is there as of now, I tried to play it on PC again, since it has much more content.
I gave up after about an hour. Not only does my Vita play Terraria more smoothly than my PC (because I just can't be bothered to figure out how to optimize it), it feels way better to just sit, lie or stand anywhere and play, instead of being confined to my desk. Plus, I know that even IF I optimized my rig, some update would come merrily walzing in and mess everything up again.
I also love having a collection of games on my actual shelf, instead of in a digital database that could, in theory, disappear at any point in time.

Right here [https://youtu.be/7hfRd4UY4fE?t=12m12s], TotalBiscuit and his co-host have a really interesting dicussion about the whole issue. Some points I agree with (I can get behind the idea of having more extensive options menus on consoles), some drive me up the wall (TB going on about specs, and how "weak" consoles are, for example. John, I know you yourself enjoyed Terraria. That game is not rendered in 420k or running at 666 FPS, and it's still... wait for it... FUN).

Games are supposed to be fun. They don't need to look photo-realistic, and I don't want to get a PHD in computering, just to have fun. For some people, getting their games to run properly is part of that fun, but that's just not me.