The Performance Gap Between PC and Consoles

@Juub1990:

You have been given a name and handed your arse, up your game,

HAH

@Grey_Eyed_Elf: "The gap between the X1X and a 2080 Ti is the difference between playing Forza Horizon 4 at 4K/30FPS and 4K/60FPS..."

If you were trying to prove that high end gaming isn't worth it, you just did. You can get an x1x for 299 bucks nowadays....how much is the 2080ti alone?

PC had its heyday when it had AAA exclusives like half life, age of empires, command and conquer etc...

Where is 5.2B coming from?

How ahead PCs are is based on the budget of your PC. No doubt the PS5 and Series X will smoke a typical PC in the same price range. But high-end and enthusiast builds will always be ahead of the current consoles.

We're also past the point of diminishing returns on graphics. Each generation of consoles have had smaller and smaller leaps in terms of visuals. You can only add so many polys to a model before continuing to add more is pointless because you won't see the difference. Focus now should be on stable framerates and resolution.

Im also not sold on ray tracing yet. It makes everything look wet and kind of fake.

@Juub1990:

Here :

@the_master_race: And?

@Juub1990

Ps:

This only the digital side, the consoles side are mostly physical, while pc is mostly digital.

I am not anticipating 40% across the board. I anticipate 100% improvement in raytracing and at best 30% on everything else. DLSS is not coming to consoles but machine learning is which MS has already been using for uprezing of textures. This tech can be used in the same manner as DLSS and for game streaming.

It depends on the type of game and how multi threaded the game is. But since these consoles are suppose to handle up to 120 fps your going to need more cpu power.

For example Doom Enteral, at 4k to keep the 120 fps minimum you need at least 4th gen i7 while using RTX 2080S however your still bottlenecking the gpu since a Ryzen 3700x is able to provide 27 fps higher minimum, and 47 higher average fps while using same RTX 2080S.

@Pedro:

I highly doubt that 100% jump.

So your predictions are quite optimistic here.

I specifically stated ray tracing.

The Gap will always be forever widening as consoles and PC both keep improving over time and technology. The gamer world is always evolving.

It'll pretty much always be ahead. The only time consoles will come close is at the start of a new gen. Although, it does seem like it's widening at the end of every console cycle just a bit more than the last. The 2080 Ti is a huge step up from the Xbox One X.

@Pedro:

Yes, but even in RT, the jump seems too huge to be true.

Gotta love the moving goal posts. When 2080TI comes up, immediately the goal post is changed to price/performance.

Anyone claiming that PC is not ahead is deluded. PC will always have the advantage because you can upgrade it, basically every year. Yes consoles are much better bang for your buck in the long run but if you are solely looking for performance, you will always go PC. If companies like AMD and Nvidia pushed for crossfire/SLI and devs released games that support multi-gpu, we wouldn't be having this conversation at all.

PC lead is dictated by how big of a jump we get from gen to gen. If IPC and throughput jump by a lot, the gap widens a lot, if not then the gap is smaller....but this is only for the 1st generation of new hardware after release, in a 5-8 year life cycle you can bet your ass that console hardware will be pretty much obsolete in comparison to the higher end offerings that PC has. Shit even mid tier will trade blows with consoles.
Consoles do have an advantage, being a closed system, software can be better optimized and tuned for it, which allows devs to squeeze a lot more out of the available resources.

I mainly play strategy and simulation games on the PC. And some RPG's, but I admit the time where I had a beefy PC is over. I just don't see the point of it anymore. I remember being young and wanting to do it because there were exclusive PC games that simply couldn't be played anywhere else. But that time is gone.

To be honest, when I played God of War and Horizon on the PS4, they impressed me too much, morseo than any PC game screenshots I saw. So, I really don't see the point in getting a beefy rig, tbh. Still, I'm a PC gamer, since I mainly play strategy and simulation games. But I just find console exclusives to blow my mind more, at least this gen.

Its the one area that has the room for the biggest improvement.

A lot of console "graphics enthusiasts" at this site (Tormentos, R-Gamer, BoxREkt, Giovela) keep telling me FPS is no big deal and doesn't matter. Giovela for gens now, saying 27 fps is enough.

They are lying. Objectively. Going from 60 to 100+ with Gsync is astounding. Hell some of them still play games at 30. It really perplexes me, they can't actually care about graphics.

Nah. Playing at higher settings and fps is better. The gap won't be any different than other gens, PC hardware from 2021 will widen the gap again, bigly.

Keep playing distant 2nd.

30% seems oddly pessimistic. 100% improvement in RT is oddly optimistic. Would expect something like 40% in general raster performance and 70% improvement in RT or so.

Machine learning will indeed be on consoles but I'm unsure what sort of dedicated hardware AMD has to help with that. NVIDIA RTX cards have their tensor cores which are used for DLSS.

I think with hardware optimization and better alogirthms, they can potentially achieve that level of improvement. Raster performance has been stagnating the most thus my 30%.

The machine learning is something that AMD has done pretty well with. If I recall correctly their implementation is unified and is part of the WGP units instead of dedicated separate units. We will see.

PC is leagues ahead of consoles it's not even comparable.

Max cores currently on PC are 64 with 128 threads.

Max memory is about 2tb. ( 7 times faster on gb's and 1000 times faster with access speed then PS5 SSD. )

26gb's is currently top end SSD performance in 4 way raid, probably double that when consoles are out.

Current PC tflops sits at around 36tflops currently for gaming segment, 2x heavily oc'ed titan rtx. with 48gb of v-ram memory booted.

Big chance it will be double that when consoles come out with new gen cards.

Go tell me exactly how consoles compare.

Also PC doesn't sit at 4k resolutions, it's pointless. which results in far far faster performance straight out of the gate at a lower resolution with weaker hardware on top of it.

In other words pc gaming is cheap as shit to get comparable console performance at lower resolutions.

I don't get why people even keep discussing this. Do people think the gap is closing? Is going to close? It's not. Ever. Because "PC" does not refer to a single set piece of hardware, made by a single manufacturer, and upgraded only once or twice in a 5-8 year span. PC hardware options are being upgraded with new stuff constantly, and there's always a massive range of those options, from the dirt-cheap to the completely insane enthusiast level, and everything in between.

No matter how powerful Sony or Microsoft makes a new console, there are high end gaming PCs that are more powerful already, years before those consoles launch. And even if the new console is comparable to a good-but-not-top-of-the-line PC at the time of its launch, that won't last. Because that console will be on the market, unchanged, for several years, but Intel, AMD and nVidia aren't going to stop releasing new processors during that time.

It's almost amazing how people still can't grasp this concept, after watching it play out, repeatedly, for decades.

The biggest advantage of PC is not the power but the its versatility and openness.

Speaking of power, consoles don't ever had a chance. How could you compare something that gets a new iteration ~5-7 years years while the other almost every year.

LOL at the 64 Core and 36TFLOPS. The lengths some people go are so stupid its just chuckle worthy.

@Pedro:

I know that, but seeing a 100% jump is out of reach in the foreseeable future.

20% to 30% is more likely.

We will figure it soon enough though.

I'm just glad Microsoft at least went with top of the line-ish parts from their chosen supplier for their new console (unlike last generation, where even the "powerful" console was built for economy and contained at launch a lower-midrange GPU and low-end laptop CPU). Developers will want to push the envelope more with more raw power available right out the gate.

I'm currently playing the witcher @ 5120x1440p ultrawide everything on full at 90fps.....

So, the gap is huge.

To me its more about the user input gap than the performance gap... but thats nice too.

In terms of performance, the best PC will always outclass the best console. No contest. The latest "next gen" console might close the gap slightly, but then they're stuck there until the next release while PC hardware continues to race ahead. Unless consoles adopt a modular system that allows for piecemeal upgrades (and at a reasonable cost), they will never catch up with the PC.

Only if you have a potato PC, have no idea how to read system requirements, or have no idea how to tune a game for best performance. But, yes, if that's too tall of a hurdle for you then you best stick with consoles.

@Gatygun: You just made yourself look like a complete derp.

What gap? I don't recall consoles getting anywhere near PC's as far as exclusives go.

Sorry mate, difference between consoles and PC is massive and will widen even further when those consoles are out.

Anybody that thinks otherwise is just feeling themselves.

@Gatygun: I'm aware of that, but high core CPUs run games like absolute shit. It's a well known fact that PCs destroy consoles for gaming. But when you go off the deep end talking about $7,000 CPUs that run games substantially worse than a $3-500 desktop CPU..........yea. Or yapping about Titans when they are actually slower with gaming than their Ti counterparts.

The upcoming consoles are still built for economy and not high end. Why do you think they went with SSD this time? It's not that they care about loading time or new gameplay etc. It's to cut down cost on memory.

Sounds like consoles have caught up, but it won't last long. New gpus every year and I heard nvidia's next gen will be significant.

And I doubt there'll be a big mid gen upgrade in consoles because they're throwing the kitchen sink at them now. MS haven't got the same incentive to upgrade like they did with the Xbone.

I don't see the point about having a discussion about a power gap closure that never lasts.

This is not the first time consoles have caught up to PCs at launch.

I honestly just don't care and keep caring less and less about PC gaming. I'm currently playing the FF7 remake on a PS4 pro and for the most part it looks insane. Running it on a console 3x as powerful in the next few months will give me all I need, granted it takes advantage of the hardware. Then 3 years later the Pro Variants will be out if you really need more power.

Some people don't realize the importance of design. They have this notion of more power would fix the problems of bad design but it doesn't. This why games look this good on the supposed shit hardware.

@Pedro: @r-gamer: :or just some people don't have the same opinion as you.

Things are also very different when you are 10' away from your screen vs 3-4'. (insert display size / viewing distance graph here)

But this board runs on blanket statements and gross generalizations. "some people" "most systems cant run". Most people don't give a shit about video games, so they must suck right? That is not speculation, but a statistical fact. Thats where that line of thinking ends up. Pop music gets the most sales, so it must be the best type of music, right? The list goes on.

Therefore the only bar of comparison should be what you yourself have, and not mystery people you know nothing about. But that wouldnt fit your speculative narrative.

I don't understand the poll options

@Pedro: Yes and with diminishing returns it just doesn't mean as much. I remember when Crysis came out if you had a high end PC it really did look far better then anything available on consoles. Now that's no longer the case ... you have to look at side by side comparison's to see one version has more bushes 500 yards away.

PC gamers hate 30fps but it does look like 60fps will be a new standard on consoles.

@HalcyonScarlet: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thegamer.com/ps5-pro-confirmed-possible/amp/

Looks like Sony will still do a Pro Variant.

It's been widening in recent years. I think the smallest the gap has ever been was maybe during the PS2 era, and that was two decades. Since then, the gap has been growing; next-gen consoles have more or less been surpassed by middle-of-the-road PC hardware for over a year now, it's only going to be worse once they are released.

So few games these days really push the limits of PC hardware because the folks with the budget to do so are usually making multiplatform titles, requiring a game engine that is more or less dumbed down. It's a legit problem, any objective developer will, in so many words, tell you that console's hardware limits progress.

TL;DR: you're only as strong as the weakest link in the chain, and consoles are a very weak link.

Yeah you should be nicer to him lol.

@mrbojangles25: Its going to get worst despite the fact that performance is plateauing? Are you all critically thinking?

"its going to get worse even though performance is reaching a plateau? Are you even using critical thinking?"

trolls are beyond obvious when their grammar is absolute shit.

Grammar doesn't invalidate points. Next time consider an actual counter argument. :)

Being a troll completely invalidates points. You don't give a shit either way and just want to contradict everyone and everything just to get a rise out of them.

I am still waiting for the counter point. :)

Don't care.