$600 PS3 vs $600 8800 GTX: An analysis 7 years later.

As for DirectX 12, read http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/appbuilder/archive/2013/10/14/raising-the-bar-with-direct3d.aspx

"The Xbox One graphics API is “Direct3D 11.x” and the Xbox One hardware provides a superset of Direct3D 11.2 functionality"

"We’re also working with our ISV and IHV partners on future efforts, including bringing the lightweight runtime and tooling capabilities of the Xbox One Direct3D implementation to Windows, and identifying the next generation of advanced 3D graphics technologies"

Xbox One's DirectX11.X is already a superset of PC's DirectX11.2. Sorry, Windows 8.1's DirectX11.2 is already behind. This is why AMD has Mantle i.e. can't wait for post-DirectX11.2

No way, a q6600 was over 500 dollars, and it launched in 2007. And I remember my ram being about 50+ bucks for 2gb. I built my pc in 2007 and I bought an e6700 which was about 200-300 bucks. I love PC gaming and I had an 8800gtx with that pc as well, and that gave me a good 3-4 years of high end gaming, but your pulling these prices out of your ass.

But for the record, I enjoyed my time with the 8800 much more than I ever have with my ps3

Now you're just being wrong.

less than $40 for RAM in 2006? NO, just NO.

I paid more than $100 for 4gb of RAM back in 2009, and I remember it was 2010-2011 when RAM became "dirt cheap" back in 06, 2gb of ram was EXPENSIVE. so 4gb of RAM probably cost $150 LIKE I SAID.

As for DVD drives, I remember them cost $30-40 and requiring a silly mail-in-rebate to be cheaper than 30 bucks. So yeah, no.

Q6600 for $250? in 2006? Stop pulling numbers out of your ass dude.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2007/01/08/intel_unveils_core_2_quad_q6600/1

$500+ and that's 2007, not 2006.

So AGAIN, I am right. $300 on a decent quad core CPU is legit.

Why is it that you hermits keep pretending that PC parts cost the same in 2006 as they do today?

Just because you can buy a quadcore CPU, a GPU and 8gb of ram for a couple hundred bucks TODAY does not mean you could SEVEN YEARS AGO.

I'm telling you, a CPU on par with the Cell Engine is $300++ As for mobos, I'm not 100% sure but no way could you get a GOOD (not a cheap and crappy one) for $80 as you claim. remember PC with Q6600/8800 GTX is high end, so we are talking about a HIGH END mobo from 2006. Thats easily 200 bucks.

So as I originally stated, TC is comparing a $1500 PC with a $600 PS3.

and you still need a monitor to play PC games...

@adamosmaki: You clearly miss the concept about price at a specific point in time. Just like PC components came down in price, so did the PS3.

I never read the thread the first time. If TC wants that, he needs to correct the title first..

Better as in power, the 8800GTX.

Better as in price, PS3 by far.

Again, CELL's SPU is not quite a CPU e.g. fails the Motorola 68000's supervisor/user mode test.

Uh no. You forgot Crysis Warhead. And great many indie titles. The list goes on and on. And not mention playing many AAA titles at 1080P and or higher resolutions than what the PS3 could do.

Why would I not able to play games with my "little card". 8800 GTX will not only play games, it will play it better than the PS3.

For your information, even before the PS3 was released intel already had their 2nd Generation Dual cores out, hence the name Core 2 Duo. With the first generation dual cores being the Pentium D. Intel had "Smithfield," the first x86 dual-core microprocessor intended for desktop computers LONG before the PS3 came out. P4 on new PC was nearly non existent in 2006.

AMD also had Athlon 64 X2 Dual Cores by 2005, which I was a proud owner of.

And good luck finding a Pentium 4 with a Pci-express slot. So, there goes your argument about popping in a 8800 GTX in a P4. How do I know? I actually used to own a Dell P4 and I had limited option in upgrading the GPU as AMD an nVidia had pretty much abandoned making GPU's for P4 based AGP systems. I had to settle for 7600 GT AGP. And also, since P4 became very rare by 2006, upgrading the CPU was even more expensive than newer CPU's. It cost's a lot more money to upgrade my Old Dell to a P4 to 3.06 GHZ where as I could have used that money to buy a more powerful cheaper dual core.

I don’t disagree with anything you said. I too am a PS3/PC user like you and really love my PS3 and enjoy PS3 exclusives like Uncharted 2 or even other multi-plat games like Red Dead Redemption which I brought for my PS3 as I heard that game will never see the light of the day on the PC. I really, also like the Blu-ray player in the PS3 which I heard was a really high quality Blu-ray player that Sony put in. Much better than the standard Blu-ray players you find. Watched Skyfall in FULL HD 1080P last night and it looks GORGEOUS on my new Samsung 60” Plasma. Blu-ray combined with a high end Plasm/LED/LCD 1080P HDTV is truly a sight to behold and I am so glad Sony was won the war over HD DVD. Never really liked the fact that HD DVD held 25GB less than Blu-ray and that was somehow was being pushed as mainstream and that should become the standard. Why would you want something that has hold’s less space per disk as the standard? But I digress.

The point of the thread was that 7 year old PC hardware will be able outdated and won’t work on the same settings in games 7 years down the road was proved false in many cases as proven by my thread.

Is anyone else just as impressed with the fact that to this day the 8800GTX is a completely viable graphics card for anyone still with one? Damned impressive I say, and a testament to longevity in PC hardware!

Voodoo 1 was awesome! I would have included that in my top 3 but as revolutionary as that GPU was it didn't totallly blow away the competition as the Voodoo 2, 9700 Pro or the 8800 GTX did. Voodoo 1 didn't totally blow away the competition like for example Rage II from ATI or Matrox Millennium series. You have to remember it took ATI/AMD over 18 month's to come up with a GPU to beat the 8800 GTX and that was with the HD 4850/HD 4870. That's almost unheard of. It took similar amount of time for nvidia to beat ATI's 9700 Pro/9800 Pro/XT when nVidia relased the 6800 Ultra. And with the Voodoo 2 not only it destroyed the competiton from nVidia with their Riva 128 and ATI with their Rage Pro and later Rage Pro 128, Voodoo 2 was the first GPU to introduce the use of 2 GPU's with Voodoo 2 SLI. Not only the Voodoo 2 was beating the competition but with two Voodoo 2's in SLI it put nVidia and ATI further behind and not to mention the rest of the competition like Matrox, PowerVR, Rendition, etc.

The 8800 series was awesome. It could still run 2013 games.

Look at 8800 GTS running Bioshock Infinite at 1440x900P at Ultra settings:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZHiD3mc340

^^It looks simply stunning! That means that a 8800 GTX will run it even better and at higher resolutions!

I love how herms think they can't be argued with. They have this self-entitled sense of superiority. It's so cute and yet very very ugly.

PS4, more games, better graphics, superior performance.

No need to upgrade!

An 8800 would not play games well at above medium settings in 1080p nowadays. You're kidding yourself if you think anyone would be satisfied with an 8800 in 2012.

In the PC GPU space, it's down to AMD, Intel and NVIDIA.

oh yes. we're just spitballing. tales of old. 3dfx used to be a major player and so on.

its cool to hear the opinion of another hardware enthusiast about the transformation of the gpu landscape over the past two decades. well, its cool for me.

I got much more powerful GPU than GTX 8800 in my PC and still prefer to play games on PS3. That sums it up just fine.

Moderator Note: This post is linked to the title due to a bug/flaw in the way poll threads work, do not delete.

My laptop gpu is very close to a 8800gtx.. i say PS3 wins. While weak graphical multiplats can look a bit better on the 8800... sony exclusives win when it comes to graphics.

I still find it strange that we are arguing over something that is 5+ years old.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shZzYkpl5Nk

Modded Crysis, running on a 8800 gtx and a Q6600.

There is absolutely nothing on the ps3 that even comes close.

Edit: link doesn't work "tis but a barren wasteland"-error. just paste it in your web browser

hmmm that mod looks horrible. so blurry... that would give me a headache lol

8800gtx

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQPnT58zJ0Qvery high 720p/15-20fps lol

PS3 version of crysis was medium 720p/20-30fps with new better lighting.

No it wasn't. The 360 had a better looking version and that still looked pants compared to a med spec.

I have both versions PC and PS3. And yes PS3 is about medium.

Don't really care about 360 version, i know PS3 has better shadows and some other advantages.

BTW here you go crysis PC on low... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NHf0FM7RFU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8dPfmiJa2c

lol damn does PS3 look better than that.

If only I hadn't made the mistake of getting the 320 MB 8800GTS. Once Crysis came out, that amount of VRAM was made obsolete lol, but it ran CoD4 with 4x MSAA at 1440 x 900 at a buttery smooth 60 FPS. Damn I loved that card, and it was the first videocard I ever bought.

The ps3 version of crysis looks worse than medium settings on pc, sure it's closer to medium than low.

And the 8800 gtx can play it well on "high" settings at resolutions slightly higher than 720. I know, because I had an 8800 gt (slower than 8800 gtx) back in the day and crysis ran great at 720p, high settings, 2x aa, then I got another 8800 gt and was able to crank the resolution and settings up a bit.

The ps3 which runs it on lower than medium, would produce a slide show at best with comparable graphics to the 8800 gtx (crysis high 2x aa)

To this day I haven't seen anything on the ps3 that even comes close to crysis on high.

Crysis on console is on the Cry Engine 3, the PC version is Cry engine 2, the 3rd engine is made with consoles in mind.

Just a point with the argument of "PS3 $600 vs a PC of $3000 for total build" what about the comparison that they already have the PC and just updated their graphics for that Gen? Surely that is a fair comparison of price?

The 8800gtx wins hands down as an overall piece of hardware. Considering the longevity of the card and if we are honest, the PS3 was not the best made console in the first place. They could have had better graphics if they just stuck with a simple quad core, upped the RAM even by another 256 which cost based wise over the investment over TEH CELL which did diddly squat for the PS3; would have been the smarter move.

This is a bad argument because it assumes that you already had a PC that you could put an 8800gtx in. If this were the case you would be running with a very old CPU and probably 2 gigs of RAM. If you didn't have that, you would probably have to buy a new mobo, new ram, and a $300 Intel Core 2 Duo processor to have a high end rig suitable for the 8800gtx. Weaker CPUs would have bottlenecked the thing, it was a true beast in 2006.

Even if you somehow managed to keep all of that under $600 (improbable but for arguments sake let's roll with it), you would then be stuck turning down graphics settings as early as 2008. Now if all you care about is meagerly beating the consoles then sure, you're "winning". However to rational PC gamers this really isn't enough. By 2010 you would be really hurting to keep up with the big PC games and you would be even making sacrifices with the console ports. By 2013, would you really be satisfied playing Bioshock Infinite at 1080p at lower settings under 60fps? Yeah you're beating the consoles technically, but from a PC gamer perspective that's practically unacceptable. Chances are your overall experience won't be that great.

Since you're DX10 max you're starting to enter the realm of missing out on some PC games. Call of Duty Ghosts and Crysis 3 both don't officially support DX10 and are DX11 native games (which is laughable for Call of Duty). Furthermore the 8800 GTX has been not even falling under the minimum system requirements for quite a few games for a couple of years now.

However on the Playstation 3, while you'll be playing the latest games under 1080p and at 30fps, you'll still be able to play them and not have to spend any time tweaking settings and running unofficial fixes to get games to work.

Let's be rational here. Could a 8800gtx last you the last 7 years? Technically yes. However that would be a very pathetic experience towards the end of the life while the Playstation 3 has thrived with a handful of fantastic exclusives in the past few years as well as continued multiplatform support.

When you're struggling to run console games on your aging PC you're really not PC gaming anymore, you're pathetically trying to prove a point and the only person really missing out is yourself. No rational PC gamer who spends a lot of time playing video games would keep the same PC for 7 years straight. That's illogical and going to amount to a terrible user experience after awhile.

BF3 ran terribly on DX10 cards because DICE optimized the engine to use DX11 to gain performance, this is why such cards like the GTX 570/480 would stomp all over the GTX 295, yet the 295 on paper is a faster card.

I would hate to be on a 8800GTX passed the years 2007, Crysis was bearly playable on the entire G80/G92 lineup.

Crysis barely ran on my 8800 GTS. Hell my 4890 had some problems with Crysis. That's why I laughed so hard when they ported it to the PS3/360. The results of Crysis running on the PS3/360 were exactly what I expected, absolute shit.

I ran 2 8800 GTX's in SLI from 2008-2011 in my gaming rig. I still use my PS3, 2006-present. (Well, at least until I bought my PS4 on launch day).

I would definitely have taken the 8800GTX in 2006 given the option and assuming I'd have a high end CPU/ram. Consoles are definitely more streamlined and it would have been more of a pain to tweak settings on PC as the years wore on to keep things playable, but I still think it would have been worth it. For the sole reason that PC load times are almost always way better than consoles. Also, Steam Sales. And lastly a Q6600/8800GTX/8gb ram setup can still run pretty much anything out there at 720P.

I agree with this.

@Wasdie:

With this round, both next-gen consoles and PC equiped with AMD GCN shares similar hardware designs and PC GCN has Mantle which is a "console like" graphics API that is similar to PS4's graphics API.

This senerio doesn't exist with 2005/2006 era consoles and PCs.

#@ronvalencia Yeah I would argue that it's essentially down to 2 players. AMD and nVidia ever since intel canned their Larrabee Gaming GPU which was supposed to take on nVidia and AMD in the high end discrete GPU space.

It's cool for me too! Liked your opinion on the matter. :) I am a bit of a history buff when it comes to old 3D graphics cards. I used to **drool** over graphics card's like the 3DFX Voodoo 2 when I used to read about it in PC magazines and looking at benchmarks in games like Quake II, Turok, Forsaken, Need for Speed 3, Hexen II, Unreal, etc. It was like pr0n for me, lol. It was a great time in the 90's with so many GPU players in the game. And the difference between games running in "3D Acceleration" mode as they called it and non-3D acceleration mode was like Night and Day. Each and every game had the "wow" factor if you ran it in "3D acceleration mode". Now, it's only down to two players in the descrete graphics space. But it was interesting times indeed to see the early birth of 3D accelerated graphics with all these graphics companies fighting each other for graphic supermacy.

I wouldn't call it a bad argument. If you look at my link with a Core 2 Duo and a 8800 GTS it's running Bioshock Infinite it at higher resoluition and looks better than the PS3 version. So, if you were running it on a 8800 GTX it would look even better and probably run it at a higher resolution. It all depends on the games.

I too ran Crysis on a 48XX series GPU. A 4870 to be exact, ran it maxed out without AA at 1440x900. It was very playable. Ran Crysis Warhead on the same GPU, it ran even better because Crytek made the game more optimized.

@Xtasy26:

You can't count out Intel since it has the potential to scale thier Haswell's GT3 IEUs (stream prcoessors). Intel IGP's engineering team is made out of ex-AMD VLIW5 and ex-3DLabs personnel.

Desktop Intel Iris Pro 5200 has ~832 GLOPS and it's OpenCL capable. The next process node might make it 1.6 TFLOPS.

If Intel supports Mantle, it removes the requirement for monthly optimised drivers that targets specific game titles i.e. AMD Mantle APIs are more deterministic (console like) when compared to PC's Direct3D APIs.

No one is arguing that. However, you would be able to do 1080P in many games from <2006-2009, games that the PS3 could only dream of running @1080p. Secondly, it would run other games past 2009 at 900P or higher than 720P, mind you with better textures, AA and better detail.

Bought my PS3 & and a new PC with an 8800GTX in 2007. My 8800 was great while it lasted, but it died in 2011. My PS3 is still going strong and gaming like a mofo (What, still no GTA V for the PC...oh well). Anyone wanna guess which one was the better value?

I don't see the point of that. PC gaming should be about getting the best experience possible, not scraping by and barely being better than the consoles. And I hate it when any pc game that uses the mouse doesn't run at 60 fps which would mean those settings would be way lower.

I think everone can agree that the 8800 gtx is technically superior, running more advanced graphics with higher frame rates and resolutions. But no serious pc gamer would keep a graphic card for seven years. Even if it manages to run games better than the consoles it still lags far behind newer pc hardware. This just proves that the ps3 can not outperform a hi-end pc from 2006, however it was great value when it was released at $600 as no similarly priced pc from that year could keep up, and it featured a blue-ray player.

History will repeat it self - a $400 pc will not be able to keep up with the ps4 but a hi-end rig from today ( i7 4770k + gtx780ti / r9 290x) will always have a distinct edge over the ps4, the difference in processing/graphics power is just so huge that no optimization in the world will ever make up for it.

Xbox360 didnt have a GPU comparable to a PC GPU of $130.

@True_Gamer_ said:

Xbox360 didnt have a GPU comparable to a PC GPU of $130.

I've never said that the 360 had a gpu comparable to a $130 pc gpu. The 360 was actually pretty cutting edge on it's release date, having a gpu with unified shaders before gpu's with such technology were available to pc's

What PS3 exclusive has near 1000k, 600k, 800k respectivly at peak times over the course of years and still growing hmmm? what ps3 exclusive had 14 million paid subscribers to their games? oh right none.... even LBP died off towards sub 5k players. Killzone 2 LOL.

critic scores are by far the worst measure of quality and gameplay. more like "is it pretty and is it simple for simpletons? is it slightly better graphics than other console games? yes? does it have guns? YES **** TEN OUT OF TEN GOTY EDITORS CHOICE ****

I think I can safely say that anyone with a clue doesn't give a damn about GOTYs.

@miiiiv said:

@True_Gamer_ said:

Xbox360 didnt have a GPU comparable to a PC GPU of $130.

I've never said that the 360 had a gpu comparable to a $130 pc gpu. The 360 was actually pretty cutting edge on it's release date, having a gpu with unified shaders before gpu's with such technology were available to pc's

But PS4 has a gpu that on launch is comparable to the R7 260x at $129 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150688

Now look at the 360 in 2005....In order for history to repeat itself console makes should have put stronger parts in their machines....but they went nintendo on consolites rears....I dont even want to go into what the poor Xbone is.